Just stumbled across a really useful service offered by DuckDuckGo*, a chat-bot. Kind of like your personal privacy conscious butler that answers nearly every question in seconds. Sure, you cannot talk to it, nor does it talk back, we’ll leave that to Siri, but I’ve yet to find a quicker way to access info on my mobile. The latest news or exchange rates, the weather in Arusha, the square root of PI, whatever tickles your fancy.

Using any jabber-compliant Instant Messaging client, and yes that includes your Google-Talk, Pidgin and Trillian IM clients, simply add im@ddg.gg to your contact list and fire away.

Check-out the screen shots below to see how it works, and visit the DuckDuckGo Goodies page to get an idea of the possibilities.

I just love the quick response, especially on my Android phone it is a lot faster then any web-search, using the very lightweight XMPP as opposed to rendering HTML text and pictures. It also gives me just the relevant info, conveniently formatted for the small-ish screen.

A full explanation on DDG’s chatbot can be read on this entry on Gabriel Weinberg’s blog.

* for those that think DuckDuckGo is nothing more then a silly name, it’s actually a very quick, accurate and above all privacy conscious search engine. It can be accessed easilly using their secure search page at https://duckduckgo.com and just as easilly be integrated into many browsers as (the default) search engine. They do not track, nor do they log your searches and offer way less crap and spam in their results then, for instance, Google or Bing Search.