Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
DuckDuckHack (duckduckhack.com)
149 points by evolve2k on Oct 28, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 19 comments



A couple minor nitpicks, in the interest of improving the site:

- On smaller screens/windows, the "plugin examples" slides overlap the text at the top, particularly the subheadline/description. Obscuring this text prevents visitors from immediately understanding what the site is about, which could cause them to bounce quickly.

- I'm not a fan of the missing vertical scrollbar, but that's just a personal opinion. It should be noted that it does appear if you use the arrow keys to scroll, but not if you use PgUp/PgDn or Home/End. If you page down and then start scrolling with the arrow keys, you get scrolled back to the top of the page to where you would have been had you used the arrows from the start. It's inconsistent, and potentially confusing.

- I'm not sure about the advice to non-Perl programmers that "if you don't know Perl, you can just use this Rosetta Stone-like page to hack it together using your language of choice as a reference". Again, that's a personal opinion, but it seems like it could easily lead to poor quality plugins.


Related to that, I don't like that when I scroll, the top part disappears. It looks like it was designed that way, but it's quite annoying. After a little bit, I realized that if I clicked the little x, the landing page would come back as before. It doesn't come back if I reverse my action (scroll up).

Just put the content below and don't be fancy. This will let you get rid of that silly bar with the x, which doesn't do anything useful.

All in all though, the idea seems cool. I may look into Duck Duck Go again sometime.


Thanks for the feedback, will pass it along.



Pretty cool, and made me try DuckDuckGo as my default browser again. As for the DuckDuckHacks site; i'm missing an exhaustive overview of which 'hacks' are already done/being worked on.. for instance; python is already live as far as i can tell but it isn't in the Fathead repo. So if i have some other idea how do i quickly check if it's not already being worked on or maybe even available?




Kind of unrelated, but maybe someone from DDG will read this.

It would be really awesome if when I went to duckduckgo.co.uk it would default to UK search instead of US! :)


Right now, you can go to settings (https://duckduckgo.com/settings.html) & select UK from the region settings.


Yes I know, but if I'm not at my own workstation I have to remember to change it. I'd like to go to duckduckgo.co.uk and have it immediately default to UK search - the same way Google.com does based on my IP.


Our immediate plans don't involve maintaing country specific domains. We might revisit this if/when DDG is available in additional languages.

Also, some users don't like that country level redirect and prefer the .com.

One solution, which does require a couple of steps is to use our Cloud save & save your settings anonymously in the cloud.

At the bottom of the settings page (https://duckduckgo.com/settings.html), you can enable cloud save, there is also a FAQ.


The open source nature of this all is really awesome, especially combined with the community ideas site. Very encouraging to dive in and write a plugin. Great job guys :)


This is an awesome idea and a great next step for duckduckgo. Hack your own search engine FTW!


Very cool to add extensibility to the search engine like this, anyone have any ideas of what would be good to add?



And here I was hoping for a google codesearch replacement.


This works very well on my iPhone.


Doesn't work on mobile. Text is tiny; lines are way too long


I really love this idea. Great !




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2025 batch! Applications are open till May 13

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: