LDraw Part Tracker plugin for DuckDuckGo search engine
2012-07-17, 21:53 (This post was last modified: 2012-07-18, 18:53 by Jim DeVona.)
2012-07-17, 21:53 (This post was last modified: 2012-07-18, 18:53 by Jim DeVona.)
A few months ago I wrote an LDraw Part Tracker plugin for DuckDuckGo. I've just been notified that is now live!
For example, try this query: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=98263.dat (the plugin generates the box at top)
Some background: DuckDuckGo is a search engine that accepts user-contributed plugins to provide "instant answer" responses for domain-specific queries. See DuckDuckHack for an overview of the plugin architecture. A couple different kind of plugins are possible; mine is a "fathead" plugin, which responds to keywords (part numbers) read from a data source (the tracker's part list). More fathead plugin details and examples are available here. Last but not least, here is the source code for the LDraw plugin.
Please feel free to fork and improve the plugin. The DuckDuckGo team responds to pull requests and may integrate approved changes with their site. (I think they are investing more emphasis on plugins now; the DuckDuckHack overview site did not exist when I first tried writing this plugin.)
I've listed some ideas for improvements under "Limitations" in the Readme for the plugin. The two most obvious would be to support part number-lookup-by-name (right now it's name-lookup-by-number; seems like an easy swap to make) and, especially, support for the full part library, not just the unofficial parts in the tracker. That will be a little more work, since it would need to read multiple sources. However, I think it'd be worthwhile. DuckDuckGo does some clever things with the data output by the plugin, such as auto-generating tables by category.
For example, try this query: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=98263.dat (the plugin generates the box at top)
Some background: DuckDuckGo is a search engine that accepts user-contributed plugins to provide "instant answer" responses for domain-specific queries. See DuckDuckHack for an overview of the plugin architecture. A couple different kind of plugins are possible; mine is a "fathead" plugin, which responds to keywords (part numbers) read from a data source (the tracker's part list). More fathead plugin details and examples are available here. Last but not least, here is the source code for the LDraw plugin.
Please feel free to fork and improve the plugin. The DuckDuckGo team responds to pull requests and may integrate approved changes with their site. (I think they are investing more emphasis on plugins now; the DuckDuckHack overview site did not exist when I first tried writing this plugin.)
I've listed some ideas for improvements under "Limitations" in the Readme for the plugin. The two most obvious would be to support part number-lookup-by-name (right now it's name-lookup-by-number; seems like an easy swap to make) and, especially, support for the full part library, not just the unofficial parts in the tracker. That will be a little more work, since it would need to read multiple sources. However, I think it'd be worthwhile. DuckDuckGo does some clever things with the data output by the plugin, such as auto-generating tables by category.