New DuckDuckGo design (opens in new tab)

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 :(

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

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 :)

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

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...

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.

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.

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!

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.

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).

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.

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)?

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?

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'

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

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

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

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!)

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