duckduckgo VS zeroclickinfo-spice

As you can see here, DuckDuckHack is now archieved. Actually it seems DuckDuckGo's development is dying slowly.

Hey David, while we have no plans of shutting it down as we still use it ourselves, we also don't suggest relying on it since it hasn't been actively maintained for many years and doesn't have most of our answers, e.g., DuckDuckHack was put on maintenance mode about five years ago. We recently investigated this API's use and didn't find any significant usage, and so have removed the documentation to prevent further reliance.

And then nothing. I did a whois and that IP appears to belong to duckduckhack.com which also doesn't respond to a ping. What should I do to get DDG working on my network again?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/technology/duckduckgo-con...

5+ years ago, back when [0] people noticed that Nazi sites were the top Google results for "did the holocaust happen" — presumably because of the way Google prioritized literal text match in titles/headlines for esoteric queries — DDG had been providing bespoke responses via DuckDuckHack, its crowdsourced instant answer program [1]. Back then, and today, if you query a variation of "did the holocaust happen", the top result, in big large text, is "Yes"

DuckDuckHack was discontinued in 2017 because it didn't scale. The associated code repos are still available; for example, you can see how DDG's Instant Answer test suite specifically validated answers to questions about the Holocaust and the moon landing. [2]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/11/google...

[1] https://duckduckhack.com/

[2] https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/blob/mas...

I've been contributing to this project, it's a decentralized and open source search engine that is very community-driven. Presearch's Team and it's CEO are VERY transparent, conducting weekly updates on youtube. Their goal is to become non-profit as part of their roadmap, once their search engine becomes self-sustainable. It's growing very quickly and as i said, they recently started working on community packages so users can contribute (similar to what DuckDuckGo did with duckduckhack.com). Presearch will be fully decentralized by the end of this year, and they are also in the process of open sourcing the engine. So everything is more of work-in-progress. They are also in the middle of UI-redesign to make it look more modern.

Seems to be an issue on https://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/peopleinspace.json. Duckduckgo just refers to the json file (see https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice/blob/master/lib/DDG/Spice/PeopleInSpace.pm)

> Most of DuckDuckGo's non-privacy-related selling points are their instant answers, which in my experience are really good.

And yet has no undeprecated pipeline for submitting non-"essential bug fixes" to[1].

I really love the idea of having an engine that does just a little bit more for me up front, but not if it's all closed off; that's what I'm trying to get away from.

[1]: https://duckduckhack.com/

https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice/pull/1631 Dorzuca commity o piwie