New DuckDuckGo design | Hacker News Reader

New DuckDuckGo design

duckduckgo.com

614 pointsashishk214 comments

That's awesome! I've been using the beta for a while and it's been much better than the old site.

A bunch of ideas/complains:

- It's awesome that you're showing me a nice map when I search for places/address, but let's be honest, I'll probably need to load it into an online map (OSM, MapQuest, Google Maps) to get directions. So a "open in map" button would be great (yes, I can copy/paste the address and !bang it, but it's not exactly a great experience)

- Sometimes I just want to search for images or videos. Yes, I can search "Images X" or "Videos X", but it's not nice. Also you get the minimized image/video box. I'd add two bangs, !i and !v (those right now alias to Google Images and Youtube, which have !gi and !yt anyway) to search for images/video and that will auto-open the images box.

- Auto-suggestions are neat, but please add an option to remove the "select-on-hover" behavior. It's really annoying to casually move the mouse and select something else.

That's mostly it, otherwise I'm really, really happy with DDG. Thanks, and I wonder what the future will reserve!

So the maps did work for you? I looked up a few places just to test it out and most of them were not found or not identified as places. I am living in New Hampshire, so perhaps they just haven't done much with NH addresses yet. I love duckduckgo and I am glad that they are making improvements but I currently can't use the map feature reliably.

(I'm from Italy) I can use it to find places, but not many, since it uses Yelp and Yelp it's not so widespread here (for example, my favourite Pizzeria: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pizzeria+anna%2C+bussero or restaurants in Milan, https://duckduckgo.com/?q=restaurants+in+Milan).

It does seems to work with streets too (taken from the first results of restaurants, https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Corso+Giuseppe+Garibaldi+68%2C+Mil...) but only big ones, It couldn't find my home.

I found that for the maps to work you have to be really specific. Which I would say is a knock.

For example, a local bar here where I live is called Old Hickory Whiskey Bar. If I search for "Old Hickory <City>", I get a bunch of pictures of houses, but if I search for "Old Hickory Whiskey Bar <City>", I get a map result.

Also not working for me if I search for some random street address (which works well on Google), even if I add a zip code to the end. Even if it isn't possible to be confident enough to show the map first thing like Google does, at least adding a map tap on any search that looks like it could possible be interpreted as a map would be cool (though I could fairly easily just add !map, so it isn't that important).

Edit: tried a few more and some of them work. It seems like intersections may never work and some addresses don't work.

Other suggestions for DDG:

Speaking of !bang!, did you consider making the tabs !images, !video, etc.? That might help more people discover that really cool feature that I didn't know existed until folks here mentioned it (and is why I switched to DDG as my primary search engine). Similarly, the "try these other search engines" section at the end could have !g, etc. in parentheses.

I'd also suggest keeping the X in the search bar visible all the time, at least if the page is wider than some minimum width.

I like the few orange lines at the top of the page as the only header to make it easier to identify the page. I just noticed the up arrow off to the right when scrolled down, which is helpful too.

I really like that you just show the site rather than the full url until I mouse over that result.

The one thing I miss is the longer text list of meanings; only being able to scroll three at a time isn't fun if I'm looking for number 11, but before it was easy to pick out #11 even if I had to click once to expand the results.

Edit: I just noticed the result site favicons, which is nice too. I don't remember if that was there before, but I hadn't explicitly noticed it. I use the FaviconizeTab extention on Firefox so I appreciate wider use of favicons :).

Yeah, I think it's not DDG's fault. It looks like they are using OpenStreetMaps, and OSM is not finding the address that I look up either. It's definitely an admirable project that I look forward to using eventually.

Thanks, that seems to be the case for me as well testing on openstreetmaps.org. In one case I tried openstreetmaps.org is returning two options (one of them being what I entered :/), so it seems like in that case DDG also just doesn't show a map tab.

(this reminds me why I never try to use OSM more than once every year or two; I hit too many cases too easily where it doesn't work; maybe I can just use DDG results to determine when OSM is worth trying :) ).

Hey guys, if you're looking for an alternative search engine with a different flavor, we came up with a discovery search engine that allow you to preview results before getting there and overall an upgraded user experience. oh We're in the process of going https and we don't track your search as well;-) Your feedback would be very helpful. This way: http://www.psykoo.com

I'm sorry but this is pure spam in this context. I think it would be far more prudent to submit this as its own post.

Come on, DDG is not storing datas, neither do we. This was a good feedback and we're looking for more? Beside you know how hard it is to get just a fraction of attention from the community unless you game the stats... Thanks for downvote :-S

Sorry, but I have to agree with malnourish here. I could understand you posting this, but not as a reply to my comment, which happen to be at the top of the page. If you think it's interesting enough for HN, submit it as a "Show HN".

But if you want my feedback, have it: for your "don't track" claim, I could trust you (after all, I have to trust someone in the end), but just loading the homepage send my data to Youtube (video) and Mixpanel (analytic).

Even your advertised feature, "preview the site before you browse it" is not exactly privacy-friendly. It just load the page in an iframe (if you guys want to do it right, see the ixquick-proxy on startpage and ixquick).

Also about the design, I don't think everything should be flat, but I just can't bring myself to like it. It feels like a '90s site.

Sorry for being harsh, but you pretty much asked for it.

If you consider it a "game" you should probably attempt to understand the rules of the "game". In this case, replying to the top comment with a non-sequitur self promotion is going to get you downvoted, and it did.

Since I won't see this again I thought I'd mention it - just becareful you might be violating a patent by displaying the resulting webpage of a link as an image. And I agree with the rest, this isn't the place for that.

I'm not the op, but do you know which patent?

Here's the announcement I just posted on our blog: https://duck.co/blog/whatsnew

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback to us during our public beta period! Please keep the feedback coming so we can quickly iterate. We really do listen to it all.

I love this. I'm excited to share with friends. In fact I looked for a sharing button. Anyway, looks nice. It wouldn't scroll on my iPad and a button for Press at bottom right is cut off, but maybe those are known issues.

FYI, the /whatsnew site seems to be roughly unusable on my iPhone; I can't switch bullet without making some weird unreproducible gesture.

About one issue with the fonts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7773911

http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/

Ironically, that page fails with JS disabled.

Related: I've spent more than a few minutes on sites unwrapping carouseled content to just display stacked on the page. It's fucking annoying.

Carousels are definitely overused, but they can still be a solid choice, depending on your design goals. If you just want to make people look at more ads, then most people will not bother.

But, I clicked all the way through before reading the comments here because I found it a compelling way to tell their story.

edit: actually, I happily clicked through this: https://duckduckgo.com/about The "what's new" carousel did feel a little tedious.

This is a really amazing direction in terms of design. Like most people probably, I've pretty much ignored DDG because it didn't seem to be doing anything more than Google already did, but this design is really interesting for going in a new direction.

The only thing that stands out to me as less useful than the equivalent Google search at this point is the hiearchy of the results. Google uses a link-like blue color for the titles of each result, which seems like a leftover from a past age of the web, but is actually useful for scan-ability because the text of the headers stands out.

Compare the current DuckDuckGo... https://i.cloudup.com/vrwZgUkOty.png

...to Google... https://i.cloudup.com/eFCFEE5TYG.png

...to an adjusted version of DuckDuckGo... https://i.cloudup.com/jluIYZWtzz.png

Having an extra color for the headings lets you scan the page much more easily, which lets you get to the result you wanted faster. The downside is that since their brand color is red, it feels "best" to have the highlight color red. But then that has some negative emotional connotations. Tried green as well, but it didn't stand on it's own enough since there's so little green on the page.

Anyways, I've switched to DDG as my default and will try it out for a while again. I also love those favicons that show up next to the domain names.

"Like most people probably, I've pretty much ignored DDG because it didn't seem to be doing anything more than Google already did"

Generally the primary feature is that DDG does _less_ than Google, insofar as tracking you around the internet.

You should try the "Classic" theme, which at least shows results' titles as blue, but not all links.

I like ianstormtaylor's suggestion above more (which uses one orange color for titles and gray for links). Mixing both orange and blue in the Classic theme for links and titles looks somewhat irritating.

UPDATE: DDG allows setting custom colors, great! Check out https://duckduckgo.com/settings (Color).

Amazing! Thanks for the tip. For others, the two colors I went with are:

    Normal: #C22D00
    Visited: #CF6D5A

Love that design suggestion! It looks so much better!

Btw, you can make it your default today by playing with the ddg address parameters:

https://duckduckgo.com/?k9=%23b02900&q=melanie%20laurent

This solution is preferable to changing colors in the settings screen if you regularly delete your cookies (and with it the custom colors) - just change your browser search engine shortcut.

More info: https://duckduckgo.com/params

Actually there is a "Cloud Save" feature that helps you save (and restore) your setting without using cookies. Scroll to the bottom of the settings page and you'll see it.

As the page says, "The benefit of [Cloud Save] over using the URL parameters bookmarklet is that when you change settings, they will automatically be saved in the cloud."

In particular, you can set this as your default for the Link color in the settings menu[1] found in the upper right.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/settings

Address parameters? Nice! DDG, never leave me.

I was trying to figure out what about DDG's results page made it so much harder for me to scan than Google, and this is definitely it. Just a bit more hierarchy makes the page so much easier to process.

Honestly, I don't care how clean or nice the page design is, until it can't give me good results. Here is an example:

The other day, I was searching for a Django core developer's contact. I knew his exact name was Baptiste Mispelon so I searched that directly.

On Google [1] after his Twitter and Github accounts, the first picture is correct, and I did not have to do anything else, the contact infos are there, his picture is there, great.

On DuckDuckGo [2] the picture is not even close, and the first couple of results are not as useful as on Google [1].

I think it is a mistake to concentrate on clean design on a search engine until the searching algorithm is not that good. AFAIK Google's page ranking algorithm is well known, when I were in university I even heard stories that a student (going on the same class as me) reproduced the algorithms only on his own!

TL;DR: I want to search relevant information with a search engine, not to look some nice webpage.

[1]: https://www.google.hu/search?q=Baptiste+Mispelon

[2]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Baptiste+Mispelon

I get the same three top answers, the only difference being in what place they are. On Google it was Github/Twitter/LinkedIn while on DDG it was Twitter/LinkedIn/Github. No problems here.

Did you find out how the guy looks immediately? I did not, and DDG even misinformed me. His Github, Twitter, and Linkedin are in the top5 results and all of them share the same profile picture, still DDG show some other picture for no good reason.

> I think it is a mistake to concentrate on clean design on a search engine until the searching algorithm is not that good.

The team focusing on the design is, I'm sure, not the same team focusing on the search algorithm. I don't see any reason why the design team should stop improvements because of the search algorithm.

I general if the money is spent on design but the functionality is not quite there yet, that money is not very well spent...

Downvoted, as that is a misunderstanding that design is neither just on the surface, nor underneath. It pervades all the way through. You have to iteratively improve it all.

When I search "Baptiste Mispelon" in Google, the first three results are:

(1) Ad for Christianity

(2) GitHub Profile

(3) Twitter Profile

When I search the same thing on DuckDuckGo, the first three results are:

(1) Twitter Profile

(2) LinkedIn Profile

(3) GitHub Profile

I definitely think that the first couple of results on DuckDuckGo are as useful as those produced by Google, if not more so.

Strange, I don't see any ads at the top :O on Google. I have no ad blocker enabled.

Well maybe they decided you weren't a good match for the ad after they trawled through all your email.

Do you have AdBlock or the like?

I didn't get an ad either. With my search order being Github, twitter, photos, linkedin.

I got the same results. The images are quite random.

Adblock, do not track, ghostery, privacy badger, and Google's opt-out cookie are among the tools I'm aware of which may affect this behavior. It's complicated.

Google may provide results that are more relevant based on you looking for someone you are in a community with, whose pages you are searching for are relevant based on searches you have made.

This specifically relies on keeping information about you that DDG won't.

"I think it is a mistake to concentrate on clean design on a search engine until the searching algorithm is not that good. AFAIK Google's page ranking algorithm is well known, when I were in university I even heard stories that a student (going on the same class as me) reproduced the algorithms only on his own!"

Dude they're working on it. Modern search isn't as easy as having a college student implement a crawler with the pagerank algorithm, don't belittle the team like that.

Thanks! We'd also encourage every developer to check out: http://duckduckhack.com/ The example reported doesn't seem to be an issue the organic links but if you find any at all, please let us know. Also, we're on the lookout for any instant answers that pop by default but are irrelevant for the query. If you see any, please let us know at https://duck.co/forum

How about you incorporate "flag as irrelevant" button next to each result? Or some way of users reporting back to you the order they would expect from your SE? I am not sure how you could combat misuse, but I'm sure there coule be some measures taken.

I'd like to see this as well. There used to be a single link for the results page to report bad results, though it didn't allow adding any details or flagging particular links. And even that seems to have disappeared.

We'll definitely think about how to improve this! We added the Feedback button in the Menu options so that people used the Feedback page: https://duckduckgo.com/feedback That way, the reports are really actionable (since it's broken out by type) and people don't spam the form :\

I saw that link, and the categorization seems fine, but following the feedback link doesn't automatically capture the search data. You need a link that automatically includes the search query, so that the user doesn't have to manually transcribe that data.

Ideally, you should do so via JavaScript inline on the search query page, to make it easy for the user to note the bad search results without switching back and forth between the results page and the feedback page.

Click feedback link, click category, identify relevant/irrelevant results, optionally type a sentence or two, submit. That flow needs some UX optimization.

> people don't spam the form

Use captchas; a rather obvious solution, but mentioning in case you overlooked it.

The "Answers" /goodies link here just goes to the splash page. Do you know the correct page?

http://duckduckhack.com/

This is what I see on DDG search page: http://i.imgur.com/Ec4sCKp.png

Everything position seems relevant, and first 6 are good sources of personal contact info.

Not bad.

Instead of putting a large box at the top of some search results with what you think I want, why not put it to the side (the way Google does) and make use of the large amount of waster whitespace. I have tonnes of horizontal space available, not much vertical.

This would also mean that the results don't suddenly jump position when the top box loads. Many times I've mis-clicked because of the page flow change.

Yes, this always seemed like a gross usability faux pas to me. If you don't wait for some unknown period after you see the first result, you risk clicking on an unwanted link that unexpectedly appeared under your cursor.

Maybe this is fixed with the redesign?

I agree entirely. I really liked the instant answer boxes above the search results in the old design, but using the same box to present images and videos in a film-strip design feels awkward. (And that box doesn't support horizontal scrolling, either.)

I do really like having the images and videos readily available; I just don't feel like the current presentation strikes the right balance between the text search results and "hey, you might want these images or videos", unlike the extremely valuable instant-answer boxes, which when present are almost always what I want.

I've been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for almost three years.

It's improved fairly steadily in that time (as measured by how often I end up falling back to appending "!g" to my search), but this is the single biggest improvement I can remember in my time as a user.

Aside from the auto-complete (which is nice), it feels significantly faster, and it's also easier to parse visually.

I'm really excited about seeing DuckDuckGo evolve, and it seems more and more people are as well: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html

My need for !g has certainly decreased, but I also find that when I do use it I often feel that the DuckDuckGo result was actually closer to what I wanted.

DuckDuckGo seems to be getting better, while Google is getting worse in some areas. The results that I get from Google is still impressive, but more and more it seems that they are making wrong assumptions about my wishes.

Is there anyway you know of to use DDG in the omnibar with some kind of autocomplete? That's the dealbreaker for me right now...I tried installing the chrome extension but it only lets you search in the omnibar by typing 'd'+space first, and still uses google's autocomplete (for "d [your search term], no less")

http://ddgg.nfriedly.com/

To clarify, this is not a DuckDuckGo product and having your autosuggestions come from Google means passing your searches to them as well. The next version of DuckDuckGo was released today: https://duckduckgo.com/ and includes our own autosuggest (with !bang autosuggest as well--just type !) . You can get autosuggest in your browser's address bar with some of our browser addons like the Firefox one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-fo...

https://duckduckgo.com/tty/ = better

New home page for me, thanks!

It still has a keyboard bug (tabs switching doesn't work with Ctrl+PgUp / Ctrl + PgDwn when there).

seems to hijack a lot of browser keys in fact. I don't like that.

I use <alt>d to select the text in my address bar. If I am on a duckduckgo search results page, it seems this keyboard combination is intercepted and I'm bounced off to one of the results (well, the 'd' on it's own does this too). I can also use <ctrl>l, but I've gotten use to using <alt>d.

[edit] I have bug reported this. They have a very good feedback system on their website.

There's also "F6", which is just a single key. Maybe that will be easier to get used to.

There's also ^L, a chord which I find much easier to type than reaching up three rows to an F key (especially with my caps lock mapped to control).

Regardless, he shouldn't have to change his shortcut because a website (a search engine, no less) hijacks his keys. That's bad UX.

I've never really bought into DDG, especially for its lack of features. It still can't match Google, but this is certainly a step in the right direction and gives me pause to think about using it at least once in a while now. Glad to see progress in search outside of Google for a change.

This post made me finally create an account here. I do admit that personalized searches improve result quality a lot, at least for some topics. But after using DDG as my main search engine for about a year, > especially for its lack of features just sounds wrong. On the contrary, I tend to feel really helpless when using Google because of the lack of DDG bang syntax. For me, DDG is like my perfectly customized search engine with all the features I need - without actually customizing anything. This enables me to have the same, good search experience wherever I am (notebook, desktop PC, tablet, some else's machine...)

So to conclude this: Not relying on the search engine to guess your intention based on personalization takes some time to get used to, but for me it definitely payed off.

any good resources for learning how to effectively use DDG?

https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

all of the boolean and ':' filters from google work also.

Why is kermitdance's reply to this post dead now?

Probably because they used a url shortener.

I've tried DuckDuckGo a couple times before. Today I decided to give it one day and see if I felt more comfortable with it. I was having a really hard time parsing the results so I did a search side by side in Google and DuckDuckGo. I looked at Google and thought "yeah, I know I want link #3" then I looked over to DuckDuckGo and saw that the same link was result #2 but I couldn't identify it as the page I wanted just by looking at the results page. Further analysis helped me to understand the process I use for parsing search results. It turns out that the most important part is the URL and I've trained myself to look for that in the format Google renders it (right after the link). When I realized that this was what I was actually looking for, it all became much easier.

> Today I decided to give it one day and see if I felt more comfortable with it.

I tried that myself several times, and never quite managed to do it. It only stuck when I forced myself to do it for an extended period, at which point I finally started being able to reliably differentiate between "good results" and "results that feel like Google". I found it disturbing to realize how much I had conflated those.

White text over white images on https://duckduckgo.com/whatsnew - not very readable!

(Edit: How odd; a reload caused the page to be displayed differently, with the images below the text and icons.)

Yeah I noticed that as well on the first click its all thrown at the center, and a reload fixes it.

I experienced the exact same behavior. I'm guessing it's probably the result of some plugin.

Yeah looks like it's a typo in the CSS. There's a unitless height value that's generally ignored but causes problems for some browsers apparently. A fix should go out in the next deploy, but in the meantime you can apply a local style to fix it (for the curious)...

.page-whatsnew .site-wrapper--static, .page-whatsnew .content-wrap, .blk--whatsnew { height: auto; }

Personally I am not a fan of horizontal navigation that breaks scrollwheels.

People get through websites with scrollwheels. Forcing people to use non-standard scrolling (left right) AND forcing them to do with click handles... I wonder if they're keeping data on how many people see the main preview and quit out versus how many actually see the other 5+ slides...

I clicked on "press" at the bottom (which happened to be at the bottom left of the screenshot on my device). Thinking it meant, "press me to continue" (which seemed a bit weird). Nope. It's their press page.

So, yeah, the "what's new" page is real clunky, but I haven't, so far, been offended by the changes to their actual design. I haven't used it much since the changeover, but DDG is my primary search engine, so I'll probably have opinions on it soon.

I did the exact same thing. "How does this work? What am I supposed to do? Oh I'll press the press button!"

I felt kinda dumb after finding myself on the press page. I feel better knowing I'm not the only one similarly fooled.

What changed since the preview was announced? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7700192 The contrast on the main page is still too low.

We have implemented a bunch of the feedback from the original discussion. Detailed release notes were posted in the forum: https://duck.co/forum/thread/5747/duckduckgo-beta-refinement... https://duck.co/forum/thread/5851/duckduckgo-beta-refinement...

We also added themes (in the side menu) to address some of the feedback on contrast. Classic theme reverts to the color scheme of the old site. And you can fine tune the individual colors further in Settings.

Thanks, the 'dark' theme seems to have the best contrast, better than both the classic and default themes!

I can't express how much I like having a dark theme. Thanks so much for making a page I can refer to at night that is both clear and doesn't feel like I turned a lamp on two feet from my face!

Thanks! I'd totally miss the themes functionality if not for your comment. Just switched to Dark to match my desktop theme and it looks perfect. I hope more themes will be added in the future.

Small but surprisingly annoying thing about DDG: I have to hit TAB too many times to start cycling through search results, on google one TAB takes me to the first search result, on DDG it's an unintuitive series of links.

Why tab? You can just use arrow up and down to navigate the search results directly.

You've just made me very happy.

For fellow vimmers, using j & k also works ;-)

Unfortunately, I use vimperator so j and k scroll for me. I'm glad to see some sites incorporating some good keyboard shortcuts, though! Maybe one day I can ditch vimperator in favor of common keyboard commands in my favorite sites.

You can disable vimperator on certain sites

:ignorekeys

The fonts look messed up for me (Debian testing / Firefox 29.0.1). In some cases letter i has a shifted dot (see the word Wikipedia in the last search result in the image below):

https://i.imgur.com/SsicEFJ.png

The fonts come from here:

* https://duckduckgo.com/font/ProximaNova-Sbold-webfont.woff

* https://duckduckgo.com/font/ProximaNova-Reg-webfont.woff

This is due to patents. I blogged a solution some while ago, but since then removed my the entire blog, here is a raw paste of the original commit: https://gist.github.com/klrr/73ce6da0fb6947ed92a5

My settings already include antialiasing and hinting (with medium level). The only difference I see is that in your configuration autohint is true across all fonts (not in mine). I enabled it for a few fonts only, since it's recommended not to use it for all:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_Configuration#Auto...

> The Autohinter attempts to do automatic hinting and disregards any existing hinting information. Originally it was the default because TrueType2 fonts were patent-protected but now that these patents have expired there's very little reason to use it. It does work better with fonts that have broken or no hinting information but it will be strongly sub-optimal for fonts with good hinting information. Generally common fonts are of the later kind so autohinter will not be useful.

Anyway, I don't think it's related to the shifted letter "i".

By the way, how does fontconfig translate to the Web fonts? Is there any way to affect them through it on the individual basis and not with global configuration?

UPDATE: Just found this: https://necoro.wordpress.com/2013/04/29/matching-web-fonts-w...

Autohinter did make things better for the "i" letter (but not completely).

Here is my final result for adding to $HOME/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf

    <!-- Fixing DuckDuckGo font -->
    <match target="font">
      <test name="family">
        <string>@font-face:DDG_ProximaNova</string>
      </test>
      <edit mode="assign" name="autohint">
        <bool>true</bool>
      </edit>
      <edit mode="assign" name="lcdfilter">
        <const>lcddefault</const>
      </edit>
    </match>

I tried DDG about six months ago and went back to Google, but I recently tried it again. The gap is closing fast. As of now it's my default search. Google still does a better job seemingly "understanding" queries sometimes, so occasionally I go over there, but I'd say I'm only doing that about 5% of the time.

One of my favorite things about DDG is that I do not have to worry about "search bubbles." I don't have to worry that DDG is profiling me and de-prioritizing results it doesn't "think" I would want to see. I know Google thinks search bubbles are a feature but I think they're a bug. I don't want some algorithm trying to reinforce cognitive biases for me so I don't experience the shock of a dissenting opinion. I've observed a few times that DDG seems to do a better job finding really obscure things, and I've wondered if this might somehow be related to profiling algorithms or lack thereof.

I also find the level of data mining Google (and Facebook) engage in to be creepy, invasive, and to hold a high potential for abuse. I'm certainly open to alternatives whose business model does not revolve around that kind of intrusive personal profiling. I'm aware that DDG does have an ad-and-analytics business model, but they seem to be taking the high road with it.

Prediction: "privacy is dead" will in the future be regarded as an idea that greatly harmed several multi-billion-dollar companies. I think it's firmly in the realm of utter crackpot nonsense, and anyone who thinks this is either hopelessly naive or delusional about the political, social, and economic realities of the world. A full-blown user revolt is underway.

Interesting to see that many of their "whatsnew" examples use Yandex[1]. Is that a new partnership?

[1] http://imgur.com/3tBrS7h

Yandex has been one of DDG's sources for a while now: https://duck.co/help/results/sources

Nice catch -- this is interesting.

Has Yandex ever had any privacy concerns? How did this partnership come about?

Why is DDG leveraging Yandex?

I imagine it all still goes through DDG, so it would be very difficult for Yandex to disambiguate more than a short stretch of a stream of search queries (let alone associate them with a person) even if they wanted to.

There's still the issue of individual queries revealing something that the user doesn't wish revealed. It would be interesting to see how exactly DDG uses these other search engines as sources (and if they are able to make demands with regard to logging), but it's worth noting that DDG logs search queries itself (just not associated with a person), so that may not be possible to ask for.

The new design looks pretty slick. I really dig the bootstrappiness of it. I do, however, have a couple of nits. I couldn't figure out how to make the weather in centigrade, so I tried searching for this:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=weather+palo+alto+in+centigrade

It came up with some interesting results. The images opened automatically for me (not sure why) and were a little off the mark. Ideally there would be a link to switch between Celsius and Fahrenheit, with maybe even a cookie to save your preference, although I don't know if that's very anti-DDG (does DDG store cookies for anything?). Yahoo "solves" this by having you go to weather.yahoo.ca to default to metric. At any rate, given that 95.5% of the world's population uses metric, it'd be a nice feature.

I think I found a bug. I'm using the dark theme and customizing the colors. If I set my background color to #000001, all of my text will turn blue (#0202FF).

Also, setting the Header option to Off is the same as On With Scrolling. This is on ff29.

Other than that, I think I'm finally switching over to ddg.

Good design but disappointing that the search and Menu option disappear when the browser size is shrunk to tablet or mobile phone resolution. Not responsive.

I feel like this hasn't been really tested in Chrome on Windows. The gray, detail information on search results is pretty hard to get past. I kind of just give up using it halfway though, looks like it might be better on other browsers though.

You can change the default theme using the menu icon in the right hand corner. We have a couple of themes preset, you can try implementing your own color scheme by selecting the "Settings" option.

In all cases, the font size makes it hard to read. Seems like increasing the font size just helps. Thanks though!

The detailed descriptions on DDG and Google are both exactly the same size, 13px. I think the people complaining about these visual issues are imagining things.

Font size isn't exactly comparable across different font families. In the case of DDG they are using DDG_ProximaNova, while in the case of Google they are using Arial.

Arial is much easier to read on Chrome for Windows over DDG_ProximaNova.

I also just noticed that we can change the font on the settings page, just feel like it shouldn't be necessary.

Unrelated UI nitpicking: I feel like I should be able to scroll on this page. Just seeing the top of the virtual screen is annoying.

Yes, I couldn't concentrate on content because I had an urge to scroll it down.

Really like the new update, but I still don't like how there is a dead click space between the results, and I find the background hover to be unnecessary.

Wow DDG, you guys are on fiyah! I just rebooted Firefox and saw the new new look; love it. What I noticed:

* Someone looking to search immediately may be confused/frustrated as the text entry field is currently not visible until the slideshow ends.

* Consider relocating the "press" button away from bottom right; I almost missed it and only saw it because I'd been on the page for a few minutes, finished the slideshow and was looking for more.

* Also, when I saw that button, I thought it meant "press this to see something cool", so I was disappointed when it only took me to the company press page.

* I really like the background colour scheme on the front page but you might consider switching it off as it doesn't carry over to other pages. I.e I found the visual discontinuity a bit jarring when the search and press pages didn't reflect it; that's when I realized that the biggest message I got unconsciously was that my default DDG pages would now be in this colour (with ability to change it). I see now that the pages depicted on "inner" screen were the usual white, but I honestly didn't see/process that against the bolder background.

Not sure if anyone at DDG would ever read this, but my comments on the preview are still valid.

The contrast is way too low, it prefers vertical over horizontal (I, like any people, have a widescreen monitor. Displaying 3 search results by default is a little absurd), a couple other issues.

It feels like a mobile interface.

Oh, and there's no way to revert to the old version. The options merely change the color scheme, as far as I can tell.

Changing the color scheme to "classic" on the side helps but doesn't completely fix the low contrast.

You can also fine tune the individual colors on the results page in Settings (https://duckduckgo.com/settings)

Try the 'dark' theme

I don't get this contrast thing everyone is saying. My eyes are shit, and the "light grey on white" pops out fine. Any darker and it would be annoying. I really like the current color scheme.

My 'puter is a mac with retina screen - so maybe it's a monitor thing? Are there any "progressive desaturation" or "color calibration detection" tricks available to web devs in these situations?

Maybe we just look at different parts of the UI when complaining about the contrast. The contrast for the search results is fine, the low-contrast is the 'The search engine that doesn't track you.', and the 3 buttons at the bottom. As I said in another comment the theme 'Dark' seems to fix all the contrast issues for me. How does that theme look on your monitor?

I agree. The text color is #595959, and that's quite far from the #ffffff background.

I'm in the prime of my life, and I have issues with the color. That being said, I use a laptop - a combination of not the best monitor and reflections off the screen. In a dark room, it's fine. But I don't use the internet primarily in a dark room.

It's customizable, so it's not the part of the redesign that I have the most issues with, but still.

Maybe your monitor is misconfigured to only show the middle part of the contrast range? Anything "pops" on such a screen. Can you see all the values in this gradient? http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/Calibration/monitor_gradi...

Since this thread is potentially used for feedback, and no upvote numbers are provided, let me say: this.

While the new features are welcome, the new presentation is not, at least for me. Now I can't even describe the old format, or create a clone front-end, or ANYTHING because there was no formal cutover date given to users.

Here's a link to a screenshot of the older version:

http://cdn.fansided.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/317/files/2014/...

And I agree. Random mandatory switchovers to new interfaces are a good way to make me stop using a product.

The first time I saw that (so called) design I literally hit refresh 5 times to hopefully get that missing CSS file. Having all in just light grey and white doesn't really help finding anything quickly and why hide the path of the url onMouseOut is beyond me.

DDG is my search of choice and the pain induced yesterday is not enough to swap back to google but still, not happy at all :(

Yeah, I'm working on a userscript to add some hr's or something between the results, its so hard to read!

Next time just do a hard refresh. Hold Shift + click the refresh button

not sure if it changed a thing. The classic theme helps a lot though.

Try selecting the Classic theme in the side menu. It has blue/purple links, darker description text + full urls.

Thanks! That fixes a lot of my concerns. I hope they do some A/B testing cause I don't believe they win many friends with this contrast-free version.

Your intro says:

  Smarter Answers

  Answers to your questions from the best sources,
  developed by our open source community.

Where is the open source repository located? I would like to browse the templates/recipes/sources. Found nothing on http://duckduckhack.com

https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies and https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice

I agree that there should be a link on duckduckhack (or, if there is, it needs to be more prominent and I couldn't find it too).

On the page layout: one very positive sign is that my custom stylesheet appears to make no difference whatsoever to how the page displays. Which means that either the CSS classes have all been changed or my suggestions (recently here on HN) were all adopted.

I noticed the change, and it didn't annoy me much (any change is a bit discombobulating), which is actually high praise. I haven't stumbled into any "woah, that's cool!" features yet (though I'm noticing a few things and nodding appreciatively).

Just checked the "what's new" and I'm pretty much liking.

I'd still love to see time-bounded search provided. That's one of the very few uses that will draw me back to Google for general Web search (Google's special collections: books, scholar, news, etc., may bring me in more often).

I've been using DDG off and on for a couple of years and solidly since last June. It's definitely working for me.

In the old version, the instant answer box would usually load after the results and with some delay. Very often it would materialize the very moment I click on a result, causing the content to move, leaing me to a place I did not want to visit. That was my biggest issue actually.

I can't seem to trigger it now. So I guess it's an improvement.

Adding images makes DuckDuckGo now a legit competitor for Google for my usage. The usability has also dramatically improved as well as load times. Their mobile javascript needs to recognize gesture swiping and other minor UX improvements. But this is a leap forward for them.

The main thing to me is they still do not have driving directions. That to me is really needed to make it useable to the mainstream public.

Also searching for say chicago, IL does not show the maps tab. We need to search for Chicago IL for that. Not sure why the comma is throwing them off.

The "Meanings" feature is a great thing, semantic and ubiquitous at the same time.

It works well with "orange" as in the example, but searching for "Apple" directly shows result for the company without displaying the "Meanings" panel. We can't see the fruits' search results using that term, which is quite disappointing.

It gets more puzzling when you search for "Apples" and are displayed with the meaning tab

try: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=orange vs https://duckduckgo.com/?q=apple

Edit: apart from that this redesign is very pleasant :)

Apple shows the "Meanings" panel for me.

More search results than layout, but as a friend pointed out, "open source office suite" produces notably and significantly different top results in DDG and Google.

Specifically: the DDG results don't rank the arguably top-rated open source offic suite (LibreOffice) at the top of the results page, instead showing an order suspiciously similar to that of Bing. Google (both logged in and out) puts LibreOffice at the top of results, as does StartPage.

Some argue a bias against free software by DDG. I apply Hanlon's razor, but this is one example where improving results would be a bonus.

Screencaps of results:

http://imgur.com/a/XAb1F

My Google isn't the same as yours, so you should stop reading so much into this. Besides, it's really the same results, just ordered slightly different. For me, Google shows pcworld->libre->open. DDG shows pcworld->open->libre, e.g. #2 vs. #3.

I'm aware that Google targets its responses.

I've got my search history disabled (when logged in), and ran the second search in a logged-out session, to see if the results differed (that they don't is ... curious).

StartPage, however, claims to proxy its results anonymously, which makes the similarity with my Google search results ... interesting.

That said, for DDG not to return the leading open source office suite as its top result (similar to Bing's response) strikes me as a less-than-optimal situation.

SERP is the new Tarot.

All the more power to competition and diversity of choices. But I see these reinventions and makeover campaigns and I really wonder if things are going well or not.

I use search engines for a niche blog, and I have a need to keyword search certain specific terms which are not common words. I have consistently tested all the available search engines (there aren't many). And I have always arrived at the same conclusion: there is no better search engine out there then what Google maintains.

I am no blind Google lover, but when it comes to practicality of effective and useful products, you have to have the best, in order to make your case.

I don't like the low contrast and drab grey of the result page. It makes it much harder to jump between results with the eyes.

Luckily, there is a "classic" mode. Please Gabriel, make classic mode the default mode again.

The UI is super slick. Bravo!!

I miss some of the simplicity of the old DDG but after adjusting the only thing i find missing is the StackOverflow integration. It may totally be there, i just haven't had the right query yet...

It's there

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=apache+nginx

Awesome! Thanks

I really like the new design, but I'm still hoping for better discovery of bangs. Perhaps DDG could include links to suggested bangs alongside Images and Videos based on the search term. With the final link being a dropdown of all other available bangs (sorted by potential relevance maybe). Another possibility would be to include the list of bangs (or a shortened one) in the pull out side menu. For me, bangs are one of the best features of DDG, and it's disappointing that they aren't more discoverable.

I used DDG as my main search engine instead of Google for two weeks just now, but ended up going back because very often DDG just couldn't find the results I'm used to finding with Google in that amount of keywords.

Usually I had to add "github", "npm" or some other word that would narrow it down for DDG, while Google just knew what I wanted and/or already visited.

Maybe it's the lack of personalized search results or Google is just smarter. Either way non-personalization is a double-edged sword.

Instead, add !github or !npm to the beginning of the query to use those site's internal searches. For a specific fulltext site search, "site:" works.

But that isn't the point. The point is that in Google you don't need to do that — it just knows what you're searching on (possibly) due to the personalisation.

That is, of course, true. I personally prefer it this way, though. Now I know where I end up by triggering the right mechanics, instead of Google knowing where I end up becase it just keeps track of me that much. I can live with prepending !gh to my search. Most of the !bangs I use are two or three letters.

When it loaded, it failed to load the CSS etc. I saw the typical white page with black text and thought maybe this was their way of chiding those critical of the redesign.

Very good job DuckDuckGo team! I was just thinking that I'd have to switch back to Google because of the poor results... but this new experience has given me some hope.

What saddens me though is that we (as in "the users") still don't have a strong guarantee on the respect of our privacy. We still have to trust the DDG team. I know there is no easy technology to do it, but still, the whole thing is only marginally better than using Google.

Actually, the alternative exists already for a while. It is free software and not even in beta anymore. Check out http://yacy.net

I never really gave DDG a shot until now. I tweaked the link color as suggested above to the DDG orange #C9481C (surprised blue was the only option.. had to use custom color and dig into your CSS to find that) and I think I'll give it a shot for at least a week. !bang seems to make up for any deficiencies (I'll probably be using !gm the most, for when I need directions).. right now things are looking great. Keep up the good work!

Just a heads up, !m also leads you to Google Maps

Still not totally in love with it, but it's still my primary search engine. While looking for ways to alter the UI, found the Dark theme -- so that was a plus.

Thanks for that!

Just switched my default search engine to DuckDuckGo for a self-initiated 10 day trial. All the work you've put into the new layout / results look great.

Looks good, but they really need to weed out some spammy websites from their index.

For example, all the <domain>.<something>stats.com sites that try to get traffic when people search for various brands, or this strange one: http://www.loginto.org/<domain>-login (apparently it tries to steal login credentials, or I don't see the point).

eek--thanks for the heads up. Not to subject you to that again but do you remember what the subdomain was? Was it content from http://stats.com/ ?

There are a bunch of these subdomains that somehow get a high ranking:

clearwebstats.com pandastats.net cubestat.com allwebsitestats.com

(all in the top 10 results for one particular domain)

I'm loving the new version. I tried switching some time ago, but found the results lacking and the experience just annoying enough to not help me get to where I wanted. Now with this new version it's a whole different ball game. I've been using the beta for a while, and it's just so good .

I'm loving it – excellent work!

I am a not a big fan of all the results being down the left hand side of the page. Considering how the top fancy gadget thing seems to extend well past the right of my page with silly right arrow buttons it seems a lot of the screen is just being wasted and it would be nice to have the results at least centred.

You can move the results into the center by going to Settings > Look & Feel > Placement, and select "Middle".

This looks absolutely gorgeous!

And thank you so much for not including the large(-ish) position:fixed header/banner that we saw in the preview last week. Vertical screen estate is so precious on today's widescreen netbooks.

Is there a way to filter results by time, like on Google? I can't find it.

Dear Gabriel Weinberg, after so many posts on HN, I am still missing the point behind DDG.

Can you tell me, the end user, what are other benefits of using DDG aside _privacy_ (given I am using chrome/incognito by default)?

I guess, first of all, believing google in terms of incognito mode is a strange thing. Especially on proprietary browser. I suggest to check out, what is free software and why it is important [1]. [1]. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.

This looks pretty awesome! Good to see them doing well. Sad realization: 'what rhymes with orange' did not give a cool response. I expected it to at least try according to smart responses, haha.

I've started using ddg instead of consistently skipping it by using g! since the new design came out. I didn't really grok how much the design played into my trust of its results until now.

Big improvement imo.

This is really neat. I played around with the site awhile back and I found it particularly displeasing due to its layout and design, but now I'm really liking this modern and more minimalist look.

I hope a setting gets added to make the images and videos tab always display fullscreen results. The default display of only 4 images at a time is pointless to me. Good work otherwise.

Horizontal scrolling on a desktop is FAIL.

I also hate the way results have no apparent division between them, not even a prominent title; it makes them all blur together when I am scanning the page.

Wish they'd add pronunciation to their definitions https://duckduckgo.com/?q=define+duck

First I'm the founder of Fotoblur.com, a creative photo community. I just went to check out the site. What I'm concerned with is when I search for fotoblur (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fotoblur), and go to images, it looks like you've slurped the image source and not the source page the image comes from. You're also providing a link to download the image. Don't you have any thoughts for user's copyrights or even content providers of which you've swiped content from? Boooo.

How to turn off auto-scroll and turn pagination on?

They can both be configured in Settings: https://duckduckgo.com/settings

Nice. first thing I tried was to scroll down.. (I was on my Mac). I think because of the cut iPad(?)/Screen... Was it just me?

'Sorry, this page requires JavaScript'

> This page requires Javascript to function. If you want to use DuckDuckGo without JavaScript, please use our HTML[0] or lite[1] versions.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/html [1] https://duckduckgo.com/lite

A question for DDG or anyone who might know: How does DDG plan to monetize this without storing any data?

By selling adverts based on the current query. It already does so.

Thanks. That is sort of like going to war with knives amongst machine guns, but what do I know.

I'd say it's more like harvesting with a sickle when the competition uses John Deeres.

Doesn't mean you can't make a lot of money with your sickle.

If I could change the name of two great ideas doing great stuff they would be Ubuntu and DuckDuckGo.

Please. There's no need to have the non-descript hamburger icon on a page designed for desktop

It's the commonly known symbol for a menu button, and is used throughout the site. Don't see what the problem is?

I suppose given an assumption of who uses DDG it's okay to use the icon, but my core point is really that it's not as common as one may think.

In general, solely using an icon instead of text (or a combination of the two) is poor from a usability standpoint. Within a mobile context, I can understand the general push towards more compact treatments, but an icon with three lines does not intrinsically have any definitive meaning. While the icon may be aesthetically pleasing, I always felt there were some more effective alternatives.

There's been some recent discussion and data generated related to this icon (1,2), some of which can obviously be debated, but I think it's safe to say it's not as ubiquitous as you may think.

Overall, I don't think the hidden drawer pattern (and the associated menu icon) are appropriate for the site when it's being used on a desktop. But, it's OK given the contents of it and understandable when the site seems to have been designed mobile first and responsive. I do think more time should be given to the final 'desktop' state for a lot of responsive designs these days, though.

[1] http://jxnblk.tumblr.com/post/82486816704/an-update-on-the-h... [2] http://exisweb.net/menu-eats-hamburger

I like the arrowed version that DDG uses; I haven't seen that elsewhere (that I can recall) so far. I think the arrows encourage clicking on it to find out what is behind it, and most folks will probably not want or need to access the information behind it anyway. I prefer less text clutter personally. My personal favorite menu indicator is a small triangle in the corner of the screen (that you mouse over to get to the menu), but that is even easier to miss if you aren't expecting it (the triangle needs to be large for touch interfaces but if standardized could be set to be tiny or not graphically displaying for folks who know it is there and have a mouse).

Also, even if not perfect, I would love if sites that use infinite scroll would standardize on something to get to the stuff that is usually in small text at the bottom, and that icon seems as good as anything to me.

Firefox just changed to the three lines menu icon for the main menu so a bunch more people who haven't noticed it before will be forced to figure out what it means.

Well, today I learned that those three lines represent a hamburger.

I like DDG, but have to ask, what is the revenue model? Is it going to serve ads eventually?

DDG already serves ads, but without tracking. I disable Adblock Plus on DDG to allow those ads to appear. It's just a small text banner on top of the search results (marked as "Sponsored link").

I love the Forecast.io integration, by far the most beautifully done weather app out there.

Wow this looks great. Just set it as my default search engine. Thanks Gabe and company!

Is image search new functionality or I just missed it in the older UI?

Awesome change, results are much improved too, using it as my default.

Very cool duckduckgo.

A question. Where do ddg guys get this massive taste for color red?

Thank you.

On my iPhone 4 browser, I don't find any way to close the DuckDuckGo web page. Until I figure that one out, this new DuckDuckGo is YuckYuckNo (ha ha, I made that one up myself, I'm so Ducking funny!)

I just lost an HN Karma point for my comment pointing out the DDG webpage is seriously broken on the iphone (because it disables the browser's back and close buttons and so is effectively a roach motel). What HN Karma god loves DDG so much that it can't take criticism?

In iOS 7, you just tap on the top bar and the Safari navigation buttons appear.

It works! Thank you, rsl7. I retract my DDG hate.

It seems to cause some problems with the WOT extension?

Love the recipe search! This is fantastic!

doh! I kept trying to scroll down the page to see the rest of the image that looks like 1/3rd is cut off

since when does noch rhyme with duck

why duckduckgo instead of google?

Looks good.

DDG is my default SE. Once in a while i ave to go to other SE (Bing second, Google third) but it's a small price to pay to give them a shot.

Hopefully the market share will be more evenly distributed among SEs. Let's do our part

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