Why is this called a plugin? As far as I can see it's just an additonal search term (hn).

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=hn+startup+ideas

Compare with DDG's existing bang code for HN: !hn + startup + ideas

That searches hnsearch.com directly, and gives good results on hnsearch for the search terms.

The "plugin" search from the post has an hnsearch box at the top of DDG's results page, but when you follow the hnsearch link, those results are not as good as the !hn search (IMO).

The nice thing about the "plugin" search is that there are results from the rest of the web. But that's normal.

Am I missing something?

Bang syntax (like !hn) will take to directly to the sites search. Try for example "!g hacker news".

Plugins, or goodies I think ddg calls them keeps you within the site and provides more info in that zero-click box.

Understood, but I don't see the plug, or the in. They've just added "hn" as another term in the search string. Did I lose or miss something?

The plug part is http://duckduckhack.com/ -- that is, these are open source components that plug into the system via this glue. This one in particular is at https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice/blob/maste... and https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice/blob/maste...

The in part is they get submitted and we try hard to make them all useful and thus "in" DDG by default. However, ultimately you could a) consume them in your own applications (off DDG); and b) choose to turn some off or on more of the time.

You're right actually. I think at the moment you can't turn off individual "goodies" either.

That would be a good set of options however.

Google is an excellent search engine. If you have privacy concerns, don't store your personal information with Google. It's really that simple. Switching to other search engines because of privacy concerns is just silly in my opinion. I have those concerns as well, but instead of missing out on Google search I choose to not use any of Google's other services (e.g. Gmail, G+, etc.) that would store my personal information (and possibly tie it to my searches). If you want to take advantage of webmaster tools, analystics, etc. just create an account just for that, and don't use it for actual communication.

DDG gets confused when you use "hn github" and displays Github repositories instead. I think the algorithm should be slightly tweaked so when several keywords are present, the first one has priority over the second one.

Thanks for the feedback -- we're discussing it right now :)

How is this better than google? Even if you talk the "hacker way" the 'site:' tag is exact and specific whereas this is not.

Upvotes simply show the anti-google (anti established) mindset that hn has.

site: only returns with links that are in this subdomain. DDG searches all the links that have been posted in HN. I think this is a big difference.

I didn't mean to incite Google v/s DuckDuckGo war by posting this page. I once had an idea of having a smart Hacker News search. The idea is that the full web might have too much noise. Hacker News serves to be a collection of webpages that are interesting to us, and are intelligent. Moreover, each of them have a rating associated with them, and we don't need back-link analysis to rank them.

If I search for startup ideas in Google(full web) or in Hacker News(the interesting subset of the web), I would have a much better result in the latter, that will ensure that only those articles come that have been 'approved' by the HN community, and not noise and fraud that Google might have picked up.

Now, current hacker news searches like site:news.ycombinator.com or hnsearch fail to do this. I'm not just interested in things with this domain name, or doing exact string matches. I want to Search, and all the algorithms and techniques that made a proper search engine like magic. What hnsearch is doing is basically grep.

This DDG plugin is the closest approximation to my idea, but still not perfect. Hopefully, some day I will find from my busy semester schedule and make something awesome from this idea and show you guys. :)

In what way are these results different to if there was no HN customisation and a user searched for "hn startup ideas"? I see there is Honduras news in there with the plugin.

Nice implementation. Much more useful than my phonetic plugin (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=phonetic+hacker+news) at least :D

that's misleading. I was expecting to get hækə(ɹ) n(j)uːz

True, but it makes ordering takeaway much easier.

if you use Chrome, you can add new search engine (right click on address bar -> Edit search engines, scroll down till end) and paste this into URL query field: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+site%3Anews.ycombinator.c..., and give it a short name, for example hn. Now you can search Hacker News by typing: "hn search query" into address bar (without "").

Great tip thanks!

Now if I type the letter "n", chrome picks up "news.ycombinator.com", if I press tab second, it goes to search HN, and pressing return second goes to the sites itself. Lovely time saver.

Fantastic. Thanks!

Why dont you use http://www.hnsearch.com/ ?

It's better than HNSearch? Why?