Nib

- A non-trivial part of the current contributions included "cheat sheets" which IMO, really required a lot of effort to ensure correctness/usability but don't really provide much improvement to search results(I don't think I myself used the feature in the past 1.5 years more than 3-4 times), so, this should really free up time for DDG staff to focus on the more important instant answers and features.

- The community has been, for a while now, getting smaller and less contributing in the recent past. Backed by data from official repos(the number of commits over time, that is)[1]. After all, there are only a finite number of instant answers before they just become redundant.

- The current model for the triggers(when an instant answer gets displayed) is quite restrictive. It's just regex-based. IMO, a lot more growth can be achieved using ML models for triggering, A/B testing etc.

I'm still kind of disappointed with this. Perhaps unrelated, but does anyone have any suggestions for people willing to work on similar open source projects.

TL;DR: I don't feel this is Apple. Though, it might be wrong speculation.

I decided to subscribe to their mailing list, and this was the footer in their confirmation email:

For questions about this list, please contact: [email protected]

Now, I decided to go ahead and hit them a mail, I was hoping it'd expose some detail of the company. But here's what I got instead:

Delivery has failed to these recipients or groups:

[email protected] The email address you entered couldn't be found. Please check the recipient's email address and try to resend the message. If the problem continues, please contact your henpdesk.

Now, this is understandable, but if it's being run by Apple, I'll be damned if they make such major mistakes, seeing their own line of work. But okay, that isn't concrete evidence of that.

Here's the more interesting part of the email:

Original message headers:

Received: from FF-MAIL1.faradayfuture.com (10.0.0.6) by FF-MAIL1.faradayfuture.com (10.0.0.6) with Microsoft SMTP Server (TLS) id 15.0.847.32; Sat, 7 Nov 2015 08:11:00 -0800

Received: from mail-ob0-f178.google.com (209.85.214.178) by FF-MAIL1.faradayfuture.com (10.0.0.6) with Microsoft SMTP Server id 15.0.847.32 via Frontend Transport; Sat, 7 Nov 2015 08:11:00 -0800

[1]

Did you see it yourself? Well, the company is running on Microsoft SMTP Servers. I mean, Apple seriously would not be doing that. Using Microsoft servers themselves would be too much. It's still possible, they're taking too many measures to hide the fact that it's Apple, and a this a part of those.

Another thing, very startup-sy about the company, is that they have liked something on their Facebook page[2], posted by some fanboy, which is not really possible if unless they have the whole Apple PR department at their back, or they made it themselves and monitor it personally. I mean, it's tough for Apple to monitor it themselves. One more thing I saw their Facebook page is Verified. Many other Facebook pages, with far more likes, and possibly, equally big teams/impact[3], don't have their pages Verified. Might be Apple, this shows.