Tag Archives: Ruby

Ruby Duck Duck Go Library Updated to 1.1.0

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I have just pushed out a new version of my Duck Duck Go library for Ruby, which now allows you to pass the skip_disambiguation parameter to a query.

Normally, Duck Duck Go will return a disambiguation result for a query which has more than one possible result. Passing the skip_disambiguation parameter will force it to choose the most relevant result.

For example, searching for Bill Gates returns a disambiguation result. Add the skip_disambiguation parameter and you get the Bill Gates of Microsoft.

See the Duck Duck Go API docs for more information on the types of queries and their results.

Introducing a Ruby Library for the Duck Duck Go API

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I have just released a new Ruby library for working with the Duck Duck Go Zero-click Info API. It encapsulates the API calls and decoding and populates various objects to hold the results.

Here is the example from the README file, doing a query for Stephen Fry:

require "duck_duck_go"
 
ddg = DuckDuckGo.new
zci = ddg.zeroclickinfo("Stephen Fry") # ZeroClickInfo object
 
zci.heading # Stephen Fry
zci.abstract_text # Stephen John Fry is an English actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, ...
zci.related_topics["_"][0].text # Stephen Fry (cricketer) ...

The Zero Click API supports a number of query types. The example above is for an article search. There are also category searches (i.e. Simpsons Characters) and disambiguation searches (i.e. Apple), amongst others.

Its my first ever RubyGem, having only just taught myself Ruby. I think its OK, but please let me know if you have any feedback.

You can install from RubyGems and the docs are available at RubyDoc. The source code is available at GitHub.

Twitter is dead… Isn’t it time it grew up?

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Well, its probably not dead. But it has been down for over an hour now, which is longer than I have ever seen it down (been using it for around a year).

But isn’t it time that Twitter grew up, and started being reliable? After all, how many other websites would get away with so much downtime?

Now, I know Twitter has to deal with an extraordinary amount of data, which is not comparable to most websites. But, it is comparable to Facebook, and I don’t remember Facebook suffering so much from growing pains.

Surely it can’t all be Ruby’s fault?