I love DDG, I just want to point out that everyone is hating on Google's new search results, in part because of a distracting favicon, and DuckDuckGo results have had similar favicons for months now.
DuckDuckGo and Qwant have favicons in their search results and they don't cause the same UX problems.
A more likely problem is the information density of the results pages. Google rarely manages to put more than a single search result above the fold on my screen, while DDG generally gets in six. That, unlike favicons, is a huge disparity between the two.
But since both DDG and Google have favicons on the results page, I find it hard to believe this is really a matter that has people moving to DDG. This hypothesis basically amounts to "people are blind idiots who notice favicons on one page but not the other", and I don't think that's true.
It's got >2600 upvotes and has been high on the front page for 18 hours now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823
> people are blind idiots
Hm...you may be onto something there :-)
I maintain that favicons are VERY low on the list of reasons people are switching from Google to DDG. DDG having favicons too should be proof enough of that.
The original tweet that started the whole discussion is: "There's something strange about the recent design change to google search results, favicons and extra header text: they all look like ads, which is perhaps the point?"
The comment you replied to said: "everyone is hating on Google's new search results, in part because of a distracting favicon" (emphasis mine).
There is no real inconsistency there, but for some reason you seem to have decided that there is and that it is very important.