Thanks for helping point this out! I lead community at DuckDuckGo and there are a lot more, "Instant Answers" that the world should know about. The community of open source devs really deserve a standing ovation for things like this (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=who%27s+in+space&ia=answer).
Check out the whole list of answers in development and live here: https://duck.co/ia
Most of what DDG is doing is great, and for a lot of things it's just as good as and often better than Google. It's really good to see how far you've come.
A few times I've found the instant answers are just plain wrong, and even though I've hit feedback they never got corrected. Hopefully you're trying to improve how you react to feedback? It's partly because you do so damn well on things like single link for a song lyric search, or just the answer snippet you need like an IP address, and highlight it better than Google that it becomes so noticeable when you do get something wrong.
I'd be hard pushed to remember a specific broken search to point you to as last time was around Christmas.
We're actively working towards improving feedback loops. But one of the best parts about our Instant Answers is they are open source. You, or others, can help submit new answers or correct them as part of our duckduckhack.com community. Some of our information comes from partner sites via an API and so if you find something wrong there it can take a bit longer to fix as we need to reach out to them and have it updated on their end.
As a team of 35 tackling a big problem like search we count on our community for help, but we do try and react to feedback as best we can.
If you ever seen anything grossly wrong, such as vandalized information or something malicious you can also report that to us more directly. Through our Instant Answer email at open@duckduckgo.com
Lastly, we really appreciate the feedback. Since we don't track users, we only get that type of feedback when you take the time to submit it or to post it here - so I want to let you know your voice is being heard and that we are indeed working through the feedback we get. Thanks for sharing it! :)
A month or two ago I asked for a fix to FX queries (in the wrong part of github - in fact I probably did everything wrong as I know nothing of github) - within the day someone had added the new syntax parse.
When an instant answer is developed by some member of the community, you'll notice a small (i) icon on the right side of the instant answer. Once you click on it, you'll see the details about who developed it.
This is true, but I recently switched to DDG as my primary search engine and have found that I can just add !g to any programming related queries (it redirects to Google). Best of both worlds, in my case.
I actually switched back to DuckDuckGo because I've found it's a better way to use Google than google.com
The cheat sheets and the bang commands are awesome. The no tracking by default is obviously a great benefit.
When the results are not as good, or I have a feeling Google will do it better, I just prefix with !g in the search bar and with no additional hassle I have myself a Google search.
> I actually switched back to DuckDuckGo because I've found it's a better way to use Google than google.com
Exactly my stance. Especially after setting DDG as the default search engine it is possible to directly search for an address or a translation via the address bar by
I'm not autoreleasepool, but IME, I find myself using !g about 5% of the time (counting only general searches, not things where I would be using another bang expression). About half of those times, it ends up giving me a better answer.
It's usually that the results are different, not better necessarily. I've done the reverse too; where I start with !g and then used DDG because I was unhappy with the results
Honestly, I've been using DuckDuckGo exclusively for a few years now, and I still don't use even half of the bangs or instant answer features. Occasionally the Wikipedia summaries are what I'm looking for, or I'll !define something.
My point being, even without the power user features, it's just a great search engine for everyday use.
Same here, long time ago switched to DDG and don't have many complaints. Except, sometimes devil really is in the details: duckduckgo.com is awfully long to type on mobile and it's a tiniest bit slower than google, which is a little annoying if you use it all day long while downloading something from torrents and so on.
in my addressbar and get pretty quick amazing access to a bunch of sites I know about on the internet without setting up my own custom search options on the browser itself. It has saved me tons of time and is an awesome feature.
Of course, there are more reasons to choose DDG, but I remember being pretty wowed when I first saw someone else use the one I just mentioned
I don't think you need a plugin for that? Anything typed in the address bar which doesn't look like an internet address will be sent to the default search engine by FF, so if that happens to be DDG you're ok.
That's absolutely right -- the plugin sets your default search provider, but if you just set it to DDG yourself (or search those phrases on duckduckgo.com), you would get those awesome features.
Are single quotes the preferred way of making strings nowadays then? It seems to be pretty common among new JS frameworks/libraries source code that I see nowadays.
var asdf = "asdf";
vs
var asdf = 'asdf';
I really haven't been doing any JS programming for quite a while now.
My assumption is that for JS single quotes are used because double quotes are the standard for HTML, and this allows for easier use of JS code in HTML attributes for JS events (e.g. onclick="alert('foo');").
I assume JS allows both because of the languages that came before, such as Perl, where it was a convenience to make it easier to include either double quotes or single quotes (contractions) within a string without escaping (but Perl goes much farther than that with the q and qq operators).
In other languages, such as C/C++ single quotes aren't used for string, but for character literals.
I suspect it's mostly preference & less keystrokes (single tick requires no shift key). All the answers on stack overflow seem to indicated there's not really a difference:
Some languages (Perl and PHP) will interpolate variables in double-quoted strings. Getting in the habit of typing single-quotes defends against accidentally using variable substitution when you don't mean to.
But some other languages (C/C++) have different meaning assigned to single-quoted strings. Getting in the habit of typing double quotes will ensure you will always get a string.
On my Turkish Q keyboard, double quotes are the one keystroke and single quote is shift+2. Since I'm lazy I keep using double quotes when writing JavaScript.
I'm not exactly sure why, but that seems to be the case. It might be due to the ubiquitous AirBnB JS Style guide (https://github.com/airbnb/javascript) which enforces single quotes. It's the style guide we use on my team.
Single quotes have been mainstream in JS for much longer than AirBnB has been around. Take for example, the Google style guide[1]:
> For consistency single-quotes (') are preferred to double-quotes ("). This is helpful when creating strings that include HTML
Or take the oldest version of Prototype JS I could find (a JS library from the old days), version 1.5 from Jan 2007[2]. A simple search of the source shows 690 occurrences of ' and 48 occurrences of ". jQuery 1.0, dated 2006[3] is a counter example which has many more occurrences of double quotes, but I believe single quotes were generally more common even before that.
I think, in addition to the HTML thing mentioned already, PHP also had a lot to do with it, since single quotes would be encouraged in PHP when you just want a plain string.
I'm not sure why/when the shift took place, but I do like it because it looks a lot cleaner than double quotes.
At work I use airbnb's linting configuration as shown here[1], which specifies the usage of single quotes for strings (no explanation for the preference though).
Same here, in both JavaScript and Ruby. I guess single quotes are easier to type on standard keyboard setups, but I have never been a fan for some reason.
That's true. There's also the subtler functional difference in both languages that single quote strings can have unescaped double quotation marks in them and vice versa.
Total side bar, but I always thought their brand name held them back. It really doesn't roll off the tongue in a way conducive to becoming a verb (ie. "Let me DuckDuckGo it" vs. "Let me Google it").
Curious how everyone else finds themselves working the brand name into discussions.
I agree with OP. The name isn't bad per se, but I too believe it ultimately puts a ceiling on DDG's growth and marketability. The fact is, it is awkward to use in a sentence, and it will dampen the rate of word-of-mouth marketing for that reason.
I'm not sure how tongue in cheek your remark is, but just in general if you think that trends in language, such as using a brand name as a verb, come from the top-down rather than appearing spontaneously and organically then you're on seriously the wrong track. There's a reason that people don't say 'duck it', that has nothing to do with you encouraging them to or not. You can't influence it at all really (well for sake of argument, assume that's true at least with anything but a world-leading marketing spend) - all you can do is set the seed for the brand to get used that way organically. At the moment it's not.
The branding thus far is a sunk cost. It's never too late to turn round, walk back, and take the other fork in the road if the fork you chose isn't going anywhere.
At the end of the day we look at it from the perspective of how we've come to be the startup that does things a little differently. Our headquarters is in a town of 5000 people in PA, we refuse to track our users even if it were more profitable, and we like our long quirky name. And, when you do use DuckDuckGo in a sentence people notice and it sticks with them because it is different.
We've grown 100% year over year, but at the end of the day our main focus is building a great product people love, that truly puts privacy first. Threads like this mean we're doing it right - we just want people to love being part of the flock!
> when you do use DuckDuckGo in a sentence people notice and it sticks with them because it is different
This is a good point, but I guess if a lot fewer people use it in a sentence to begin with than otherwise might, it won't provide much of an advantage in practice.
> our main focus is building a great product people love
This entirely sums up the point - DDG does things differently and that's great - going against the established grain with your product makes it what it is. But why go against the grain with your branding too? Aren't you just adding an orthogonal concern to deal with, that has nothing to do with what makes your product great?
I've corrected "duck" and "ducking" into certain profane terms so many times by now that I'd be afraid of autocorrect if I tried to use "duck it" regularly...
password [length] [weak/strong] - (ex: password 15 strong) - Generate a password of n characters (with the usual disclaimer about generating passwords from a website)
Related: We (DuckDuckGo) have a table of programming-related Instant Answers, including cheat sheets, that we're trying to complete here, so you can see what's currently available or waiting for a developer: https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki/Programming-IA...
VIM cheatsheet! Sweet..
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vim+cheatsheet&ia=answer&iax=1
duckduckgo simply gets better everytime and I've made it my default search engine. And like someone mentioned, if I find the results inadequate, I just !g it.
Revisiting duck duck go after having ignored it few years ago was a good surprise. I don't know exactly what changed or if the algorithm is good enough but it made me think about trying it again.
We encourage you to try it again for sure! We've even added a feedback button on the SERP. Despite our small size we move pretty aggressively on improving the search. In fact in the past year we've added hundreds of new Instant Answer sources and thousands of new !Bangs. So give us a test drive, set us as default for a week, let us know what is working for you and what isn't. I think one of the best parts about us, is that you can reach us. You can be engaged in this process and give feedback that helps build the search engine you want to see.
Wow, cool feature from DuckDuckGo, it seems to be working well.
If you want more detailed cheatsheet for ES6 https://github.com/DrkSephy/es6-cheatsheet is a good one, I believe.
Is this cheatsheet, and similar ones for other languages, somehow dynamically generated by DDG, or are they just producing and maintaining this content themselves? If the former, bravo! If the latter I fail to see how this is a scaleable approach for a search engine?
tldr; You can use your keyword with any of these trigger words: 'char', 'chars', 'character', 'characters', 'cheat sheet', 'cheatsheet', 'command', 'commands', 'example', 'examples', 'guide', 'help', 'quick reference', 'reference', 'shortcut', 'shortcuts', 'symbol', 'symbols', 'key bindings', 'keys', 'default keys'
"The const declaration creates a read-only reference to a value. It does not mean the value it holds is immutable, just that the variable identifier cannot be reassigned." [1]
I see a lot of complaints about this that I don't really understand. This is similar to final in Java, val in Scala, etc – sure, it's potentially referencing a mutable value, but you know it's not going to be reassigned.
- https://duckduckgo.com/?q=emacs+cheatsheet&ia=cheatsheet&iax...
- https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vim+cheatsheet&ia=answer&iax=1