Those are neat but basically intercept traffic to websites that could easily do that sort of thing. Maybe a Hacker News user made a color picker as a side project. It would be monopolistic behavior when done by major companies.
On the one hand I see the issue too, but on the other hand, it is very useful, and it looks like those tools are some kind of open source collaboration:
I don't know who controls the contributions and decides what is going to be included in the final result, but so far it looks just fine to me. After all, they still present the normal search results below the tool.
> It would be monopolistic behavior when done by major companies
Right. And when done by non-monopolies, we call it "competition".
What if I made a color picker that competes with your other HN-person-color-picker? How does that work? If my color picker gets a search engine feature, am I unfairly intercepting traffic from DDG?
Google also has a calculator and a color picker. If you want to be mad at someone taking traffic that would be Google since they have 1000x the volume of ddg.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=colorpicker
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=calculator
I just hope the search result quality will improve over time as right now, I still use !g for about 10% of my searches.