please credit me for the title :)

one thing that majorly majorly sucks about github is the completely lack of privacy controls.

as an example, here is someone elses experiences - http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1306816425.html

for myself, i have found trolls commenting on my patches and code. all i can do is turn off notifications. blocking them, doesnt actually block them - it just hides their name from my view.

linus himself commented that the worst part of github was that you couldnt disable pull requests. see http://blueparen.com/node/12

obviously there are alternatives to github. gitosis for one, sourceforge is still there, repo.or.cz is nice and old school as well, and atlassian has bitbucket i think (though ive not used it)

perhaps there is an opportunity there to team up with a less known code hosting provider, or start one (perhaps using gitolite or other open source code) and bring the duckduckgo magic to code hosting.

Would it be possible to suggest the answer to "The meaning of life" to be 42?

and perhaps some other pop-culture jokes?

other examples that spring to mind...

Q "Thats one small step for man" A "and one giant line for admission" - Futurama
Q "Speed of a sparrow" A "European or African?" - Monty Python
Q "Favourite color?" A "Blue no, yellow!!!!!", then maybe put a 304 or something - Monty Python
Q "I have a headache" A "Its not a TOOMA!" - Kindergarten Cop
Q "Once you pop" A "You cant stop!" - Push pup ads

people might even be able to suggest silly answers... although i think thats its own site now :)

or maybe steal some of these rap related graph jokes...

http://www.jamphat.com/rap/

I was walking home this evening, searching around and reading randomly using duckduckgo on my iPhone.

One thing that i found annoying was clicking through to sites without a 'mobile' version. Which lead me to two ideas.

1. Could ddg please indicate if the site has a mobile edition?

Maybe just a little icon next to the link. Im not entirely sure how you would detect this, although spoofing the agent string and diffing the results between its reply and a vanilla reply might be a reasonable indication. There may also be some indicators in the css. Once upon a time there was this idea that the designer would provide different css files for different output devices, screens, printers etc. This may also be a hint.

Perhaps search results could include a number of metadata attributes (like the little icons that hotel brochures have). Icons for say 'YouTube video embedded', 'uses jQuery' or more ambitious and pull out the number of facebook likes/tweets (maybe suck from the little icon things)

2. Could ddg provide a gateway that converts sites in to mobile sites?

Somehow taking a guess at the main content and rearranging things in to a more mobile-centric page? this would be quite challenging and perhaps illegal in some places. Removing ads may also be considered unethical.

there are a number of open source (koha and evergreen for example) public library systems, and a small number of common commercial systems. they may not implement "opensearch" or other searching standards - however due to the common software assumptions as to how to feed them search terms can be made reliably.

so based on this, could the duckduckgo spider take note of any "online public access catalogs" (opacs, in proper library terminology) and provide a unified bang search for public libraries?

you could even go a little further, and look at possible collaborations with the koha and evergreen communities to provide apis (if not already present) for search engines to hook in to. the commercial library management software suites may also find this sort of functionality attractive to add.

im not quite sure what you would then do, but i think once you hook a search engine in to a wide number of public library catalogs - there are then lots of possibilities to explore.

has anyone every suggested a daily search term tag cloud? you know those tag cloud things where more popular words are larger and sometimes in the middle?

i guess it would serve a similar sort of function as trends?

Could DDG generate a graphical view of the search results, perhaps using ZGRViewer, then you can kind of explore the results. The trick would be grouping them in to trees and branches. Which could perhaps be by category (ie forum, encyclopedia, shopping) or even just on domain names, or perhaps country?

It would be interesting though, and vaguely like the unix interface in Jurassic park

or something to that effect, which lists session times for a movie session near you.

for example !sessiontimes captain america

the "near you" part is tricky, especially if geoip isnt used.

unless of course you added it as part of the query, for example

!sessiontimes helsinki captain america

Hi DuckDuckGo,

i'd like to suggest a mac address function.

something like

!mac 00:11:22:aa:bb:cc
or
!mac 001122aabbcc

the output would then give you the oui owner, perhaps tell you if the mac address is unicast/multicast, public/private etc.

Im understanding that ddg is in perl? I have a mac address module which incorporates most of the features from the mac modules on cpan (but doesnt use moose) which ive been meaning to release on cpan.

It could do most of the heavy lifting?

- dean