I am overwhelmed with a geeky sense of joy when I search for “Philadelphia Flyers” on Google and instantly get a schedule of upcoming games as well as scores from previous ones at the top of the results.

Those type of “instant answers” make my day go smoother and keeps me from having to dig through the top ten results for the high-level things that I’m looking for, such as sports scores or flight schedules.

As with any other technology, we have our choice of search engines to pick from. While most of the world uses Google, Microsoft has Bing, and there’s a fast-rising alternative to both that we’ve told you about called DuckDuckGo. Since the end of last year, daily search queries on the site have gone up 227 percent.

To stand out from the crowd, DuckDuckGo provides some interesting search assistants or hack, which it calls “goodies”, to make your search experience more enjoyable and streamlined. Being a dark horse in the race of search also gives the company the opportunity to try out new ideas, such as letting people write plugins that alter how search results are shown.

DuckDuckHack

The company announced this initiative today and calls it “DuckDuckHack“. The platform will allow any developer to create a plugin that creates instant answers for search queries performed on the search engine.

Here what DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg had to say about the new platform today:

For example, suppose you often do searches on bioinformatics or lego parts or on other topics that we don’t know much about. Then you’re in a great position to help craft great instant answers in that area and improve your own results along with the results of others doing similar searches. We hope that DuckDuckHack will give you the opportunity to do so.

When visiting DuckDuckGo today and searching for “xkcd 115″, you’ll instantly be shown the 115th iteration of the popular web comic xkcd:

You don’t have to install these “plugins”, as they’re baked right into the search engine once they’re approved by the company. You can follow @DuckDuckHack on Twitter to find out some of the newest easter eggs.

That’s just one example of the type of search hacks that developers can start coming up with now using the platform. By visiting DuckDuckHack.com, you can find answers to all of your questions as well as get more information about the platform itself and how to get started.

The company has funding through solid investors like Union Square Ventures, so its safe to say that the growth of DuckDuckGo will continue. Is it a threat to Google? Probably not in the grand scheme of things, but the idea of innovation in search coming from a company outside of Google isn’t a crazy notion.

Since the knockdown of the proposed SOPA and PIPA acts to combat online piracy, music industry execs are mulling other ways to stop people from pirating music from their artists. Specifically, industry groups like the RIAA and IFPI are targeting search engines in hopes of sweeping links to sites like the Pirate Bay under the rug.

Torrent Freak reports today that a confidential document is making the rounds among music industry execs discussing the option of filing an unprecedented lawsuit against search giant Google.

The RIAA and IFPI contest that Google and other search engines are abusing its market dominance to “distort the market for online music”. While Google has been working with both groups to take down sites hosted on Blogger that lead to pirated content, it appears that the music industry would like to see the company step up its efforts quite a bit, or it may sue them.

According to this leaked document, the recording industry believes that Google can do more:

Google continues to fail to prioritize legal music sites over illegal sites in search results, claiming that its algorithm for search results is based on the relevance of sites to consumers.

While nobody but Google knows the true algorithm for its search results, it appears that the music industry thinks that the company is knowingly promoting the concept of downloading content illegally.

The document continues to state that if Google doesn’t start to de-list file-sharing sites like The Pirate Bay, and rank legal alternatives above them, a lawsuit may be on the way. This seems to me to be a last ditch effort for the music industry to defend its Jurassic Park ways of doing things instead of embracing new technology and shifting the way they operate. While I’m not a lawyer, I think it would be extremely difficult to force Google to do anything like what its suggesting in these documents.

Is Google to blame for music piracy or is the record industry just grasping at straws? Tell us in the comments!

Just three days ago, the Google+ team announced a new social feature that let you start a conversation based on any search you did on the service.

In my post about the feature, I wondered out loud about how long it would take Google to integrate that same feature into its main search engine:

It’s only a matter of time before this feature is introduced into Google’s main search engine. Currently, you can only +1 a search result and you’re not prompted to comment on it or discuss it. Opening up that feature on Search Plus Your World would create an infinite stream of conversation and a lot of new clicks for those whose listings get ranked high on the search engine.

Not long, according to a report by Danny Sullivan.

Without any announcement, Google is now adding links to the bottom of any search result on its search engine that says “Ask on Google+”:

This move appears to be phase two of Google’s “Search Plus Your World” initiative, making its search results more social and interactive. In his article, Sullivan suggests that while the feature is useful, it seems like “yet another way that Google+ is injecting itself into Google’s search results”. I agree, but I don’t see it as a bad thing.

When you click on the “Ask on Google+” button, you’re presented with this open box dialog:

The Google+ box pre-fills with this text, but doesn’t provide any hard-link to your search that could provide useful for friends wanting to help answer your question. None the less, as I pointed out a few days ago, this now provides Google+ users with infinite prompts to start new discussions on Google+, which is the services lifeblood.

While I think the feature is non-intrusive since it shows up at the bottom of search result pages, this is yet another example of how Google fails at following through on its communication plan. If this feature is important enough to inject into its biggest property, the search engine, isn’t it worth a blog post or other announcement explaining it? That’s the type of execution failure that draws the ire of the tech press and FTC. Users on the other hand? Only time will tell.