Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Introducing DuckDuckHack

gabrielweinberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 76 posts

Re: Introducing DuckDuckHack

#33

Post by epi0Bauqu »

mkmcdonald wrote: post #29

Nice idea. I have but one problem, and it's with the site (DuckDuckHack) itself. Could the author just make the tutorial section scrollable with the rest of the page? The current functionality is quite awkward. It's also ignorant of (most of) the keyboard (home, end, page up, page down, etc.), which is the quickest way to traverse a page.

Thanks -- the site looks for the scrollwheel and the down arrow, both of which will open the tutorial after which page down et al. should work as expected. Are you seeing different behavior or just wanted to hit page down initially?

Re: Introducing DuckDuckHack

#35

Post by pessimizer »

samdk wrote: post #26
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The !bang syntax is for pass-through search ( http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html ). So, why even bother going to DDG and not simply using address bar search shortcuts? Why would I do 'ddg !g "my" "search" "terms"' as opposed to 'g "my" "search" "terms"'?? Or is this using ddg as start page for your browser, or ... Just curious.

For me, there are a couple of benefits of having the functionality built into my search engine rather than my browser. First, all I have to do is set up DDG as the default search engine in my browser, and then I get tons of search shortcuts working without any more effort on my part. I don't have to worry about syncing between different computers, browsers (I use Chrome and Firefox at different times), and operating…

The bangs are especially good for dodging the really heavy homepages of some sites. For example, !bgg.

Re: Introducing DuckDuckHack

#36

Post by mkmcdonald »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #33
mkmcdonald wrote: post #29

Nice idea. I have but one problem, and it's with the site (DuckDuckHack) itself. Could the author just make the tutorial section scrollable with the rest of the page? The current functionality is quite awkward. It's also ignorant of (most of) the keyboard (home, end, page up, page down, etc.), which is the quickest way to traverse a page.

Thanks -- the site looks for the scrollwheel and the down arrow, both of which will open the tutorial after which page down et al. should work as expected. Are you seeing different behavior or just wanted to hit page down initially?

I'm referring specifically to the state before the pane is activated. It feels awkward to have so few options to activate it. The transition/animation also toys a bit with scrolling up/down.

Re: Introducing DuckDuckHack

#37

Post by klapinat0r »

Slightly off topic, but can anyone elaborate on the legal handling of displaying the xkcd comics? As they are fetched directly from images.xkcd.com, and do not contain a "discussion", would it still be considered Fair Use, or have they made an agreement with Randall Munroe?

Re: Introducing DuckDuckHack

#40

Post by rabidsnail »

Do you guys already support Mycroft plugins? Granted you can't use them to play tetris in the results list, but they're easier to make (you only need to know how to edit XML) and there are already thousands on http://mycroft.mozdev.org. You just need to add some heuristics to scrape the results out.

Actually, one could make a pretty good search engine that was just a frontend for mycroft that was able to extract results and figure out which plugins to use for which queries.

Post reply on HN