We're (DuckDuckGo) happy to see the response to this! Our instant answers are open source and we'd love to have one for every possible search, no matter how niche.

If anyone's interested in suggesting or creating an instant answer, check out: http://duckduckhack.com/

Also--to see most of the current IAs, look here: https://duckduckgo.com/goodies

Adding onto this (I don't work for DDG), seriously check out the zeroclickinfo project[0] if you're looking to do some open-source over the coming holidays. I wrote a SoundCloud instant answer[1] and it was my first contribution to open-source (a little less than a year ago).

That one pull request led to many others that have opened a lot of doors for me. It's a super approachable codebase and I had a lot of fun with it.

[0]: https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/goodies#Music/soundcloud_ray_bradbury

/sarcastic-mode: and for what reason? For the 3 people that still use QR? :P

yeah arguably that particular example wasn't very useful, but there are dozens which really rock: https://duckduckgo.com/goodies

I was wondering this myself.

Since a mention in HN a couple weeks ago I've been using the DDG extension for Firefox, and love it: even if you're not using DDG as a search engine, it adds very cool insights to Google result pages.

I'm finding a lot of my information without even needing to visit a page. A bit like Google's info-boxes, I can get quick answers to a lot of things without hassle.

The one area it could be a bit better is for some things that are slightly esoteric or articles that are very new. I just search with "!g" added to the query and get those via redirect (of course, that does negate privacy a bit since results are from Google).

You can always use "!s" to fetch the results through startpage.com, which anonymizes your Google query.

Is there a difference between using Startpage through DDG, and just using Startpage?

No - DDG simply redirects your query to Startpage. For me, it's just a convenient way to reach out to Google when DDG doesn't cut it.

Offtopic: Is there any way to read QR codes via JavaScript? Something like ZBar?

There's one for HTML5 https://github.com/LazarSoft/jsqrcode . I haven't really tried it though.

Looks nice! Thanks, will try that one. :) Btw, found a JS barcode reader today. Didn't try it: https://github.com/EddieLa/BarcodeReader

Are there different sizes available or just 100x100?

looks like the size depends on the length of your input -- capped at some max value