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.
- https://duckduckgo.com/?q=emacs+cheatsheet&ia=cheatsheet&iax...
- https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vim+cheatsheet&ia=answer&iax=1