2019-07-14 15:36
We've been working on integrating Instant Answers from DuckDuckGo's community effort called DuckDuckHack for a while. Today we have integrated the first two Instant Answers into our search: the calculator and game 2048.
DuckDuckGo has been building and maintaining an impressive collection of Instant Answers for its search engine. An Instant Answer is a special type of search result that highlights a specific source prominently and with an enhanced user interface. Examples are weather widgets, Wikipedia articles or song lyrics. For some Instant Answers, the result is an interactive mini-application that allows the user to take further action. A good example for this is the calculator which is a fully usable calculator that can be used once it is displayed above the normal search results.
Now the cool thing is, DuckDuckHack is an Open Source project! Hence we can integrate the existing Instant Answer into our own search engine and thereby include well-designed and battle-hardened features into it with minimal effort.
DuckDuckGo has put the DuckDuckHack program into maintenance mode in August 2017 after 5 years of operation. Only essential bug fixes can be submitted to the official repositories since then. We hope to continue the development efforts and enable the community to pick up work on their Instant Answers and provide a platform where they can be improved further.