Our XMPP services at DuckDuckGo

TL;DR: DuckDuckGo, a search-engine known for privacy, has a public XMPP service that promises the same level of privacy as their searches. They also have an XMPP chat-bot that will respond to queries over XMPP, but this is less interesting.<p>I personally am a fan of DDG and use it as my primary search engine. I do wish they'd change their name as it makes it difficult to recommend to non-technical people.

Sorry if this is slightly off-topic, but I was wondering if anyone could explain the technical reasons why, with minimal modification, we couldn't just replace all electronic messaging systems from SMS to email with xmpp, and forevermore live in a magical fantasy world where email headers, text fees and security concerns don't exist? I mean, it has these things going for it-<p>1. SSL/TLS embedded in the standard.<p>2. Easy to set up OTR encryption, (as well as any other standard I imagine).<p>3. Messages are "pushed" to clients, rather than "pulled".<p>4. The standard is simple, and servers like Prosody are super-easy to implement (unlike Exim).<p>5. There are plenty of clients already available. Admittedly it's not something I've researched much, but I doubt it'd take all that much to get Adium or whatever to work like a simple email client, (but with xmpp).<p>I'm aware of all of the social reasons why such a thing may not work, but I'd be interested to know if it were just a question of getting people to adopt it, were it to exist.

Can anyone please clearly explain what exactly did Google do regarding XMPP? Just stopped using XMPP protocol in their Hangout client? Or disabled XMPP federation on their server? The later doesn't seem to be the case - I can still communicate with the contacts from Google server (though they don't use the Hangout client).

Sadly, most of the people I would talk to are either on Google or Facebook and neither supports XMPP federation. Where's my federated client-independent IM future?

What will you do if they make encryption illegal?<p>A reason why there reportedly are backdoors in skype is because of government requirements.<p>For eg. see this news article about India asking Skype to setup local servers in India<p><a href="http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-05-20/infrastructure/39391625_1_internet-telephony-law-enforcement-servers" rel="nofollow">http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-05-20/infra...</a>

So they have a public XMPP server and a bot that gives out the instant answers in their search – I somewhat fail to see how this is groundbreaking or even interesting in any way?<p>Sure, the bot is nice to play with, but somewhat cumbersome in the long term for me. So why is this great? :)

The XMPP network needs more independent servers run by trusted entities, so I welcome this very much (I've been trusting DuckDuckGo with my searches for some time now).

This feature is great. A bit of a trojan horse - I will keep DuckDuckGo open now and search it before trying that "other" search engine.<p>The goodies (<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/goodies" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/goodies</a>) are really cool. Although they do not seem to consistently work in the chat client. Some do, some do not.

Google also has a chat bot: guru@googlelabs.com . Just add it to your contacts list and you can query it over XMPP.

Is it accessible on the 443 port like GTalk?

One of the biggest strengths of gchat is the integration with gmail, and why they have so much traction.<p>It makes less sense to chat on a free service that no one is using, but maybe some people will use it if there were a DDG email service.

Does anybody know if this supports custom domains or just the domain assigned by DDG? They seem to support only dukgo.com

X

I must agree that duckduckgo is too long and not cute, a big turn off for people like me, bad naming in my opinion, and it matters a _lot_<p>plus, duck goes slowly and unstably, again, ugly naming.