This is a copy of our monthly friends newsletter. If you want to get it via email, you can sign up on our about page.

DuckDuckGo friends,

We hope 2016 has started well for you. We began the year looking back over the past twelve months, firstly in choosing the Instant Answers that we fell in love with, and subsequently looking back on our highlights of the year:

We also published an article requested by a Twitter follower covering the basics of security certificates — this builds on a previous article explaining secure web connections. If there's something you'd like us to write about, please let us know!

Looking forward, our second global Quack & Hack event is just a couple of weeks away. This day is dedicated to helping everyone from our community get involved with our search engine via the open source side. Novice and expert developers can join us on Saturday January 30th either remotely or as part of a local meetup to learn, create and have fun!

DuckDuckGo wouldn't be the same without the contributions of our growing band of enthusiastic developers. This month's Green Bow Tie award for contribution goes to Ben Moon for rewriting the calculator and creating new templates for other developers to use. Nice work Ben! 2015 saw the addition of many templates (including our popular cheat sheets) and Instant Answers on a wide range of subjects. Some of the latest include:

Vitamin sources and benefits — duckduckgo.com/?q=vitamin+cheat+sheet&ia=answer (created by github.com/ankushg07)

Microsoft Word keyboard shortcuts — duckduckgo.com/?q=microsoft+word+shortcuts&ia=cheatsheet (created by github.com/javathunderman)

Quickly find prime numbers — duckduckgo.com/?q=prime+numbers+between+1+and+100&ia=answer (created by github.com/haojunsui)

A big thanks to all our users and contributors.

Until next month!

The DuckDuckGo staff