The next version of DuckDuckGo(next.duckduckgo.com) |
The next version of DuckDuckGo(next.duckduckgo.com) |
I am a technican. I want to see the number of results. I don't like AutoSroll. I remember the page where i find a result, so i jump to the page, with endless scroll, i did not find things again.
The sign of clicked links is a good idea.
Mark a personal favorite site in combination with my search term would be a great feature. E.g. i remember i search something about nodejs but i forgot the sitename, my browser bookmark did not help me. But when i see my old search about "nodejs" and the favorite or clicked pages, that would be a great thing.
Forget google, if somebody want to use google, he can use google. So please implement usefull functions that help people with their daily work.
Also, I searched "Juicy J Acapellas" and was impressed because I found some sites that I enjoyed that I hadn't ever found before.
Wish there was a way to have news embedded in search results similar to google, though.
If they're missing our own website from results how many other websites are missing from results which ends up not giving the user the BEST choice of options when performing a search.
edited: Oh hell no, duck.com redirects to google. That sucks.
duckie.com is parked, buy it?
Two other things. Others have mentioned having the links always blue, not just when rolling over. I would like this as well to make it a little quicker/more evident where the physical link is.
Secondly, I like the link to see more results from whichever domain, however I am wondering if we can also have a "hide results from whatever domain" so we can hide useless spammy domains that may show up in our results. This is a huge problem on Google, though I haven't noticed it as badly on DDG.
At any rate, I love DDG! Thanks for the hard work!
After that the only way for us to know would be a whistleblower. And even then we would only know that we are unsafe, not that we are safe.
Click on the "Look and Feel" tab, then change the "width" :)
The design is certainly much nicer on the eyes, without the blue links and with the little 'read' tick marks, but perhaps the focus should be on better search algorithms first?
This is great work, and I'm very glad to now switch back to DuckDuckGo as my search engine of choice. Thanks!
I search for "Denver" and the top related topic is "Gang Activity in Denver." Really?
I search for "Chicago" and the entire related topics list is places on the historic register in Chicago. Really? The whole list?
I'd turn this off until you make it work better. It grabs a lot of attention and degrades the rest of the experience. My first impression is that if DDG gets that part so wrong, what else are they getting wrong with the search results? Cruel, perhaps, but that's my impression.
The new interface is nice and fast otherwise.
There are now random DDG stickers in various cities around southern Ontario.
I still have a few with me. I can send you some if you want (contact details in profile).
Google gives me a result of a name ("Tony Abbott"), while DDG starts giving me an article from Wikipedia describing the role (this one is forgivable...)
DDG Images shows the first six images as being previous prime ministers.
Off the top of my head just having a link after the products link that said 0-click box (or something) if it was settings had it off would be useful.
A similar search (different city + keyword search), different city but same keywords as above, reveals 15 with the keyword out of 20 search results.
> Your browser indicates if you've visited this link.
I was under the impression that browsers try to block sites from being able to detect this. Traditionally, the hack has been with the :visited pseudo-class, but not sure if there's more at play here.
Kind of a weird feature for a search engine whose tagline is "The search engine that doesn't track you."
If I use the DDG TOR hidden service, 3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion, do a search and click on a search result the link goes via a DDG redirect from r.duckduckgo.com. This should be using the hidden service domain, not the duckduckgo.com domain. As it is the redirect goes over a tor exit node rather than directly via the hidden service.
Just my personal thoughts.
But to clarify, I'm happy DDG is incorporation this feature :)
I don't like the way that video search is actually Youtube search (to use 'video' is misleading, sad face). And I imagine when it comes to images is the same.
DuckDuckGo, if you would please add other media sources... Google used to do this, now it's all about keeping the user inside Google’s ecosystem.
"Less Clutter block" Our only focus is search. That means that our results are free of promotoions <--
"Discuss block" Our forums are a place -->for to<-- chat
But the single worst thing about ddg is that it's still not possible to deactivate the "did you mean?" functionality. I rarely make typing errors so I spend most keystrokes on ddg putting quotes around things that I did mean.
One issue I have is with the infinite scrolling of the results. When at the bottom of the page I would like to know how many more results there are so I am not flying blind until I randomly get to the end of the results. Not aware of any formal studies to support this just opinion :)
It seems DDG implements its own scrolling, so scrolling up does not make the controls appear, which is quite unexpected and makes a bad user experience.
Also the dropdown in search button that allowed to, say, sort the results by date. (I often forget query parameters)
Overall I like the esthetic direction ddg is taking, unfortunately I found two good features missing.
Chrome 35.0.1912.2 (from portableapps.com) on Windows XP.
So as to make sure it's not my fault for using XP, I went and updated my Arch Linux box and tried:
Firefox 29.0 on Arch Linux
Chromium 34.0.1847.132 on Arch Linux
Both of those browsers are untouched by extensions.
In every one of these cases, I go to duckduckgo.com or next.duckduckgo.com, go to the settings, change "Auto-load" to 'Off', type the test search "Rob Hubbard" into the search box at the top, press enter, scroll to the bottom of the page by dragging the scrollbar with the mouse, and see the text "More Links..." automatically change to some animated dots and then the further results appear a moment later.
Hope all this detail is helpful!
Overall the design looks decent. Remember: less is more.
I don't know if features were modified since fskc--off posted, but I'd agree strongly with both his primary concerns: ditch ALL fixed headers and footers, on ALL devices, and keep maximal contrast throughout the site. My eyes are no longer quite so young as they once were, and low contrast designs are bullshit. The "off-black on off-white" argument applies only to print materials, not online, where contrasts are inherently lower, and are worsened by increased ambient light.
I find the grey background on the focused search entry distracting. I've removed it. The outline is sufficient (if not excessive itself).
I find the font sizes in general too small. I prefer specifying fonts in points not pixels, and very, very strongly recommend that all text-oriented dimensions be either in ems or percentage of screen width. In general, don't size text elements if you can help it. I set an overall content width of between 45-50em for most sites, with a minimum 2em margin (and that's as a fallback). I apply my own CSS to many sites I visit, some 1000+ at present (yes, including HN, increasing contrast and font sizes being principle changes).
I notice the browser URL no longer reflects the present search. I dislike that change as I'll copy and paste search URLs fairly frequently. Please retain the previous behavior.
The search syntax icons on the RH side of the page underneath the "Spread DDG" link looked at first to me like social share link crap (another feature I strip from most sites). I'd suggest putting the "spread" link elsewhere and more clearly differentiating it from the actual search tools.
Of features missing on DDG which force me back to other sites, the lack of time-bounded search is probably the biggest (other than simply lacking expected search results). I've been impressed by the integration of OpenStreetMap results and would like to see similar type development, as well as your use of Wikipedia and similar informational sources in results.
Overall: fairly subtle changes, and gripes notwithstanding, not bad. That's actually high praise ;-)
Also: I'd very much like to thank you for actually previewing the design in advance of releasing it. While online services make drastic changes possible, they're not always welcome, and I feel far too many sites make the egregious error of dropping a new design on users with no warning.
For the "next.duckduckgo.com" site, I've got the following CSS tweaks presently applied. All but the last are legacy, some may no longer be strictly necessary:
#header_wrapper {
position: static;
}
#header_wrapper #header #header_content_wrapper #header_content #header_button_wrapper #header_button #header_button_menu_wrapper #header_button_menu {
z-index: 2;
}
#search_form {
font-size: 15pt;
}
.bang_suggestion:hover {
background-color: rgb(228,246, 255);
}
.bangwrap {
z-index: 2;
}
.snippet {
font-size: 14pt;
}
p, body p, li, body li, dt, body dt, dd, body dl {
font-size: 15pt;
}
.web-result:hover {
background: none;
background-color: inherit;
}I also miss all the colours and I prefer when search buttons are actual buttons instead of an icon inside the text field.
Is there a chance you might reconsider the font choice?
Looks great, if I force Helvetica.
Looks amazing, once I fixed that issue.
Loved it, very clean yet all the info is there
Plus image and video search! Really nice to have a clean image search interface with a clear download button. Do you proxy my search to youtube? What other sites are there?
EDIT: also, great response to browser zoom
- It's really slow
- It's ugly
No thanks.
On Mobile, if you do "show more meaning" there is no undo of that action. I thought the X might collapse down to the preview but it removed it altogether.
At what point will your business development team be ready to discuss integrating new spices?
We have one coming that I think your team and users would like more than the existing one.
I reported this query previously to you guys, and it appears nothing has happened. It concerns me because it's so nonsensical it erodes my trust in your results, and it has persisted like this for over a year at this point....
If you search "IGF-1" on DDG you get maybe 100 results. Now lets try the same search on Google, but with a handicap. Let's be even more strict and only show results that contain this keyword specifically in the title using "intitle:igf-1". You'll find 69,500 results (at the time of this posting).
https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=IGF-1#hl=en&q=IG...
Far less then the 5 million it claims to know about on the first page,
https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=IGF-1#hl=en&q=IG...
I would also like an option to disable r.duckduckgo.com redirects.
all in all the fact that privacy is on the side of the user is so key for me. I hate having a copy of everything I Google get stored somewhere, even in private mode.
Static for header hasn't been an issue for me. Headers that are sufficiently annoying just get iced ;-)
There are still a lot known issues that we're still working through before we can make the transition. I'm sure this thread will uncover more :)
Only one remark: While I like the effect that the full URL shows up when the mouse is above a search entry I would personally prefer to see the full URL all the time. I would be very happy if you could add an option to change that.
90+% I don't need the Why and parsing over it to find the URL is distracting.
- it indicates that there's a fairly thorough recording of searches going on, and acknowledges a reasonable possibility of keypress-by-keypress recording, and
- it doesn't work as well as google's version which accounts for local variation, and which formed part of my decision to reject google in favour of ddg.
Overall this feature creeps me out, in an "uncanny valley" kind of way. It makes me uncomfortable.
But as another check just revealed, DDG does not seem to index php.net very much, cf. https://next.duckduckgo.com/?q=string+inurl%3Aphp.net
It also does not find any php related content for my real name, whereas google does, a lot.
Edit: my bad, it seems to be site: and not inurl:
1) If I search "self storage columbia mo" I get place results but if I "search self storage 65203" I do not get place results. I noticed this does work for food using a more familiar zipcode like 90210.. but maybe still a little zip code work to be done.
2) What about when I search "thai" or "self storage" in general. DuckDuckGo is known for not tracking the user, but if I search something that with location information would most likely provide place results, shouldn't I be given some type of indicator that with just a zipcode or city name I could be given better results? That way you are educating new users while still providing them the results they need and the privacy DuckDuckGo is known for.
I forget the name of the other one, but there's another one similar to this too.
The image and video showcase is well thought out. It is digestible and smooth complement to the general search, well done!
1. I search for "ng angular", which takes me to https://next.duckduckgo.com/?q=ng%20angular
2. I've been to the top link before (http://angular-ui.github.io/ng-grid/).
3. I hover over the 'Visited Site' checkbox icon, and the hover text is obscured by the search area (specifically around the Image and Video tabs).
Overall great job. Looks super clean, I love the image and video dropdowns... keep making it easy for me to use DDG!
Edit: also submitted through your feedback system. Just gotta grab those hacker news points while they're there for the picking right? ;)
1) The checkbox for visited links. However, I think there should be an infobox (visible by default) explaining what it is the first few times you search. A link explaining how it works (for the privacy conscious) would also be good.
Things I don't like:
1) Moving the favicon below the page snippet. I think it should actually be up top and larger, since it's useful for skimming results.
2) Lack of color/contrast. Feels like someone sucked the life out of the site. This is important, because (for example) when I'm skimming results it's helpful to have the page titles (blue) stand out from the snippet (black).
3) Left-aligned results. I find it easier to skim the results when they're centered, rather than left-aligned. This is something people who have been using Google won't notice, but after reading DDG's centered results for a year or so, going back feels jarring, like I'm going out of my way to read them there. The center of the screen seems to be where I look first for content.
4) Larger header. Vertical space is precious, especially when you consider how much is already consumed by an OS menu bar, browser chrome (titlebar, address bar, bookmark bar, tab bar, status bar) and (on Mac OS) the Dock at the bottom of the screen.
Do you think something like that might be possible someday or it completely goes against your philosophy?
EDIT:
Sorry, it looks like it installed the first time. I tried to do a search. It kept using Google. So I thought it didn't install. I tried again. The keyword had already been installed, so it didn't work. Turned out it was already installed and I had to manually set it as my search provider.
As for the rest, as long as the dark/terminal themes still work (there are small bugs), that's fine by me.
one two three four ... one-hundred, two-hundred, three
This auto-complete predictive suggestion list business isn't half bad, but there's nothing I hate more about Google than their bloody "Instant" features.
Immediate disregard seems a little harsh.
Your new maps need to have an on-map credit to OpenStreetMap, as that's where the map data comes from, and OSM's licence requires attribution. osm.org/copyright explains how.
There might be some complaints/confusion about attribution from the OSM community, but overall really happy to see a major search engine use OSM maps!
DuckDuckGo isn't much better than Google; both of them hijack your links. This gives an opportunity to track what you click on. If you watch carefully your links go to "r.duckduckgo.com" -- this page also doesn't use SSL. For example:
http://r.duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&uddg=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikip...
StartPage doesn't hijack links, it (optionally) uses POST and you never send a referer header so traffic looks organic.
The contrast is too low. It is hard to read on my (relatively bad) laptop screen.
Popins only when your mouse is over something are frustrating. My mouse is not tied to my eyes! In particular, if you're scrolling with your mouse in the center of the screen, the pop-in happens a moment after you stop scrolling, which is distracting. Also, I don't like hiding information by default in general.
Additionally: there is no way to view the full URL for long URLs - they expand, but only to a point.
The top header staying put is bad from a screen real estate POV. I've got a widescreen screen, and as such I'm cramped for vertical space but horizontal space is ample.
Finally: having the right arrow to the left of the domain to search the domain, and the popin on the right saying "more from <x>" seems redundant.
As mentioned in another comment, the contrast is really bad, I find it hard to read and focus on a given result. This is much worse when using f.lux.
I also disliked the left-align on everything, I rather have it centered as it currently is. When using big widescreen monitors there is a lot of whitespace in the middle of the screen and the results show up all the way to the lower left corner... It is pretty uncomfortable to look all the way there and this makes it harder on the contrast part too because there is so much bright light already coming from the background and the font color is a light greyish. This is specially worse in multi-monitor setups.
The image and video search tabs are great, and I really like the fact they replace zero-click results when you click on them, but I wouldn't leave them in the fixed header, there is just no need for them to be there. This would reduce the size of the fixed header and make it even better.
When scrolling results using j and k, the greyish background it adds to each result makes the contrast even worse. I remember when they were yellowish, they were better back then, imo. But current design works too. I also miss the current border around it, it makes it much easier for you to find yourself if you are switching tabs and going back to the results page. I haven't measured, but the font also seems a couple pixels smaller, is it?
It is also harder to distinguish between results. It all seems like a blob of text, hard to skim through results looking just at the title. In the current design this is fantastically easy, given titles are blue. I only read stuff below the title if the title is of interest. In the new design this is much harder to do, there is not enough contrast between the title and the text under it. Keep it blue, there is absolutely no reason to change this.
Godspeed duckduckgo!
This gives them the advantage of you only being able to see what Google Searches brought people to their site through Google Analytics.
Search terms come in Google's Webmaster Tools. You can only get them in Analytics if you hook up your Webmaster Tools account to your Analytics Account.
There's probably something similar for Chrome as well.
This redesign incorporates two of the worst design trends today: very low contrast text and gratuitously, obnoxiously large fixed headers.
I dislike fixed headers on any non-phone/tablet UI because almost all laptop and desktop screens are widescreen. Fixed position elements on the sides of the screen make much more sense, although poor implementations are very unpleasant and can create a jarring parallax effect. Unfortunately, fixed elements on the sides are soooo MySpace and have fallen out fashion, and many sites waste most of the space on the sides. The header in the redesign in obscenely large and the new page shows me less results at a time.
I have young and healthy eyes with 20/20 vision. Even so, when I use my laptop for coding and reading text, I turn the brightness down because it is easier on my eyes and does not give me headaches. I believe that the best practice is to make text #000 on a white background or very light background (like news.yc does), and to let users adjust the brightness of their display if this is uncomfortable. There have been assertions by that lighter text with white is better (and unfortunately this is the latest and laziest design trend), but I have seen no formal evidence of this and believe that this is mostly a combination of overbright display screens and poor text rendering by OSes and browsers. If you turn the brightness of your screen down, you solve the "too much contrast" problem (if it ever truly existed) and can tell when any text isn't #000. For me, DuckDuckgo's current snippet display color is to light at #333, and ridiculous at #595959. If I set the brightness of my laptop to the maximum setting, the snippet text is more tolerable but still uncomfortable.
I dislike the neo-flat, iOS-like buttons, but they don't really make the site any harder to use. I find that neo-flat buttons are almost have an underlying hypocrisy. The idea behind the flat painting movement is that you can discern what was called "optical depth" without using traditional perspective to mimic the depth you see with stereoscopic vision. The neo-flat movement is based on the idea that you don't need to underline hyperlinks or add perspective based shadows and gradients to distinguish what a button is because you can just use colors alone or make everything a link. If this were really true, then you wouldn't need to make the neo-flat buttons change colors when you mouse over them, because it should be obvious that they are links. You can see similar hypocrisy in Google's A/B testing of non-centered labels in certain neo-flat buttons on their websites (especially YouTube).
Edit: I rewrote the first sentence of the third paragraph to make it more clear.
To be clear, we still don't collect or share personal
information and auto-suggest does not impact that at all.
I appreciate it may make you and others uncomfortable
and we're sensitive to that, but it is not a change in
terms of privacy. We simply do not associate queries with
personal information (e.g. IP addresses) and in fact
don't store any of it at all.
I've set it as my home page (was already using ddg for my main search).
Is there a way to turn off the links at the bottom under the search? Set as homepage, etc? I keep mousing over them and the popups are distracting. I understand why they need to be there for new users.
Great work and thanks for what you do.
When I move my cursor up and down in the results area, the listings start scrambling around like crazy. I can't even tell if they're being scrolled through or if they're just randomly changing.
I am on a Lenovo Yoga 13 (which is an ultrabook with a touchscreen) using Chrome 34.0.1847.131 m on Windows. I suspect DDG thinks I'm on a mobile device and then interprets cursor movements as finger swiping.
Edit: Yep, seems to think I'm on a mobile device. Menu is hidden behind a menu icon, but I can't get it to open with a mouseclick--only with a tap on the screen. The site is completely unusable for anyone with a Windows 8 laptop (ie, laptops with touchscreens), unless they're using it exclusively as a tablet.
1. Old DDG: http://s388.photobucket.com/user/cubancigar11/media/snapshot...
2. New DDG: http://s388.photobucket.com/user/cubancigar11/media/snapshot...
There are so many problems here:
1. Poor contrast of font-colors.
2. Poor choice of font - bold doesn't really standout as much as it should.
3. Font spacing has increased which forces me to scroll down thus breaking my thought process.
4. Icons now take vertical space instead of horizontal.
5. Mouse-hover color change has poor contrast. On my desktop I can only see it through a specific unnatural angle.
I collect domains for my open source project, OpenDomain. The sites do not actually have too much valuable content - just placeholders so people can find them.
I just checked, and quite a few of my domains are listed very highly on DDG. Not that I am complaining, but I think they are rated high just because the keywords are in the domains themselves.
For example, "NoSQL", "JSON", "Free TV", "liposculpture", "WebPlatform", and "Helpher" all scored top hits for my sites.
I am not asking for my sites to be removed specifically, but we should try to get better results - I have done NOTHING for SEO on these domains - just owned the keyword.
- I'd like some more focus on keyboard navigation. Make sure that everything looks good when tabbing, even if you've used arrow keys first.
- Anti-phishing: A long domain name will trim the end in the "More from ..." link. Instead it would make sense to trim the beginning.
- Needs better contrast.
From my understanding rover.ebay.com is used for ebay affiliate links. Is this one way DDG makes money? If not, why would they display rover.ebay.com links in search results over traditional ebay links?
EDIT: Looks like I answered my own question. They generate revenue through affiliate links.
For anyone else curious, here's the link - https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates
Also, horizontal scrolling: Please, PLEASE, no. It's just horrible and should die.
If you want greater security, you have to allocate trust amongst many entities. This is a practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance problem (http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/16444-practical-byzantine-fault... ).
My current trust model is primarily made up of my friends and family; not a third party organization online, regardless of how they market it. If I put my trust in them, my security would only be compromised if ((N-1)/3) worked together. (see http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824-2012/papers/castro-practical...) Wouldn't my activity be more secure if it was built upon that?
I'm not proposing any implementations; just food for thought.
You've struggled in the past with local searches and map inferences to non-address searches (think "Godwin Park Houston").
I threw those at next.ddg and the result back were very good. I don't see having to !g a query for these in future.
I'll edit as I use the beta in the next few days but first impression is "Hot damn, it works! Good job!"
Edit 1: There are still dot coms and business I search for that I don't get the "map this for me" option. Examples:
https://next.duckduckgo.com/?q=cpap.com
https://next.duckduckgo.com/?q=men%27s+warehouse (do I want a wiki article or do I want to find the ones close?)
https://next.duckduckgo.com/?q=whole+foods
Edit 2: The UI is so clean and nice.
This is nitpicky, but I don't like how an entire result is a link with a hovered background color. I also don't like how additional content appears when hovered. Please don't trim the URL and hide it unless the result is being hovered on.
All my social media profiles, all my websites, every project I contributed to, even websites where people credited me for my work when they used it in their own projects, all neatly sorted and with great context information. Definitely on par, if not better, than Google and visually much easier to digest. Amazing job!
I guess what I'm saying is, if Microsoft were to deny you access to Bing tomorrow, would DDG still be a pretty good search engine, or would it fall apart?
http://bit.ly/1ur3zP2 vs. https://next.duckduckgo.com/?q=medium+top+collections
1. medium.com/collections
2. medium.com/top100/may-2013 (what I would be looking for except it's from last year)
3. an article with the title "Top Medium Collections everybody should follow"
4. images (why here?) of... purses and drawer handles?(wtf? why is this here?)
5. List of Medium collections | Niccolò Brogi
At the side some advertising for something that looks like bird cages or outdoor lamp protectors from Google Shops and "Tops at Macy's"
DDG's:
1.Medium Top 100 for March 2014 (much more recent than googles and at 1st position)
Maybe you trained google well. I have not used it much in ages
Google is pretty aggressive at banning bots, and I can't imagine Google have given a competitor API access or something like that. Proxies is out of the question for this scale too.
I heave heard that they do use Bing and Yahoo search APIs, but this could be incorrect.
... and looks like MSN Search results from 2006. Not just ugly and cluttered, which I don't mind too much, but dysfunctional too: no keyboard navigation between results nor editing the search query without using the mouse to focus the box. That is an immediate no-go for me.
I‘m not entirely satisfied with startpage either though. What we really need is a local search proxy that goes via Google/Bing however you like, e.g. 1) using clearnet without cookies and cleaning up links (Google, Startpage, Bing) 2) via Tor automatically falling back if you get captcha (with option to do the captcha if you don’t like results) 3) Like 1) except via some VPN/Proxy
The results from each source (or multiple) could be normalized and the local app can offer any kind of interface you like.
I’ll write it at some point, but if anyone wants to steal that idea — please do.
Those two combined offer better privacy as no website can know what you were searching for and only secure websites know you came from DuckDuckGo. This setup doesn't give DuckDuckGo a chance to track what I'm clicking on.
Edit: I can't replicate in Chrome or Safari but if I change my user-agent in Safari, it begins hijacking my URLs. The JavaScript is obfuscated so it's hard to tell if it's actually checking for Firefox or not. The function it calls is DDG.get_http_redirect
I really like the current visuals and layout much better than the beta, particularly the contrast and blue links. I also like the favicon to the left of the page title in results.
I actually like the instant suggestions. And I like the "Images" and "Video" buttons at the top, HOWEVER I'm a massive !bang! fan, and will differ to !i and !v. Although I would prefer that both methods go to a generic images and video searches (as opposed to Google Images and YouTube). ALSO, for me when I roll over a link I want to see the url in the bottom of my browser (forgetting what Firefox calls this) and I'm not getting it with the new layouts Video suggestions.
Unfortunately, in terms of readability, the new layout is a major step backwards.
Noted on contrast. We will look into it more -- that's exactly the kind of feedback we were hoping to get.
I've been mostly against flat design for a number of reasons but IMO, you've achieved a great design. I really like the minimalism of the hamburger button. Again, everything just gets out of your way.
Perhaps enlarging the font-size of the search result snippets might help with the contrast complaints - personally, I like your use of the grays. Again, it conveys a modern design.
I really hope that there will be an updated iOS app soon too :)
Contrast has been mentioned, it's better on your "cards" (top toolbar that appears on some searches) than on the general results. Other than that, I'm not sure your choice of font is very good. It's not quite crisp enough to easily scan and read lots of text at once. I tried switching to Helvetica Neue instead of Proxima and things instantly looked more readable.
Overall a good step in the right direction though.
In the new version, it's taller, and makes it so I can only see 4 results at a time on my 1366x768 netbook. Makes me want to reach for my "fixedfixer" bookmarklet (sets all position:fixed styles to static), which is not really something I want to do every time I use my search engine. Still, that's more convenient than having to change a setting every time I clear my cookies.
Otherwise, I do like the clean and airy/breathing space in the new look.
Just be mindful of vertical screen estate, it's one of the most precious things to squander, and from a usability point of view, the only thing you can really argue that might need to be there is just the search box.
Personally, what I think is a better solution for that, is one of the older Google layouts, which had a search box at the bottom of a result page as well as at the top. Then you could just scan the first page of results and when you got to the bottom you probably had some ideas as how to refine the query, and there it was, ready for the next search! :)
I actually don't mind the fixed header on the current version because it is much smaller and less obtrusive than the header on the redesign. I dislike fixed headers on news sites like the New York Times, because I want as much vertical space as possible to read the article. On a search engine, there is no issue of losing context, so a tastefully constructed fixed header is acceptable.
I understand why you wanted to add a second toolbar for more options and am not suggesting that you removed completely remove fixed headers for the default landing page. I just think that the second toolbar could easily fit on the same line as the search bar.
And: thanks for listening to your users!
Keep up the great work!
And one more suggestion about this: When I click on the up arrow, focusing on the search bar would be nice. But that may be just me.
[0] Like this: http://cl.ly/VMql
I also dislike that the search results do not really have anything differentiating their different sections as opposed to the current results where it's easy to see title, description, and url at a glance. (To be clear, I don't think change isn't possible or that things should stay exactly the same, just that some kind of differentiating factor would be extremely helpful.)
And I also use DDG as my primary search engine. Integrating it into Firefox and only using g! when my results are poor.
On the search page, click the hamburger icon on the top right.
There you can adjust the fonts (to some extent), colors, the position of the header (make it scrolling again), and many more things. All of this is impossible with old DDG, or Google, or Bing, or Yandex, etc.
I wish people that have time to write 3 long paragraphs of complaints actually have tried what they are complaining about. Or, if they have, made it clear that they complain about the defaults.
My ideal defaults: Header should be shorter. Contrast should be higher. The O-click box should be hidden and only its tabs should be visible. It should use as much horizontal space as possible (wonder if they plan to add something on the right side). A little bit less spacing between results would be great.
Even though they seem to be nice people, I don't trust them, and I don't believe that the url they are showing is the location where I will go if I click on the link (I don't trust the status bar either), so they should remove that last line from the result and add the icon and the domain (that's ok) to the main title.
"I dislike fixed headers for any interface that isn't for a phone or tablet because almost all laptop and desktop screens are widescreen."
Are you saying that only fixed headers only work on mobile interfaces and they shouldn't be used on desktop? If so, I disagree with you. Fixed headers, if they are used at all, should only be used on desktop. There's simply not enough screen real estate on mobile. DDG actually does a nice job with this and doesn't use the fixed nav on mobile. Also, I don't see how desktop widescreen has anything to do with a fixed nav header.
If you are saying that fixed headers only belong on desktop/laptop, then I agree with you.
Fixed headers should be banned on all devices.
They're a crutch, an annoyance, steal real estate, make me dislike your site, and frequently (if I cannot remove them by some means) will encourage me to use an alternate site.
For content-heavy sites, these and similar annoyances send me straight to Readability via bookmarklet or plugin.
Though Steve, who thought he was God, took it away from some of You.
Design is an art and takes a lot of iteration of all those things I mentioned and more to obtain aesthetics and usability. Personally I find the new DDG hard to scan in part because I'm used to google, but also because there are different elements of the design I think to be poor choices:
1. The black text for header and content doesn't help anything pop. It needn't if everything else is setup correctly, but it isn't doing any favors. Instead the only color between listings is the favicon which makes it feel random.
2. The weighting of the header isn't sufficiently different from the body of the search, giving them less contrast relative to each other, and thus harder for my eyes to scan. If they had put the title in all upper case, chose a bold condense font, bigger font size, etc then there would be more contrast between the two.
3. The listings are variable length with not much white space between them, so that contributes to it being harder for my brain to chunk and reliably scan.
Those are just a few of the issues as I see it. A professional designer / typographer could help a lot more.
If you use Chrome, the Google Accessibility team has released an extension that can increase contrast / invert colors for better readability: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/high-contrast/djcf...
But the new interface is nice.
The flat look has received a lot of criticism in the past couple years, but to be completely honest, in the many arguments I've heard against it, I couldn't really find one that can really stand it's ground if I may say so. On the contrary, I find a lot of merit in the new principles that are being embraced trough this approach, such as e.g. the emphasis on interaction to distinguish elements, instead of artificially imposed "symbolisms" (whether this is an underline, or a button-shaped, well, button :) ). This gives me a hint that, as a design community, we have a more mature approach to designing for those unearthly things we call "devices" than we did a few years back :)
Sure, low contrast is very bad for walls of text such as the ones on this very site (when you "Ask HN" or "Show HN" something, but DDG's implementation directs my eyes toward the page title. If you are going to have a lot of info show on any one place, you'd better direct the viewer's attention.
I would keep the different contrast levels, but would do it differently.
Right now my there are several levels. My eyes are directed to page title and the words I searched for. Page title doesn't really help that much for most pages (unless I'm looking for something quite unspecific) and I already know the keywords I looked for. Right now I go to the keyword in a three line summary and have to find where does it fit; I begin reading from the middle, it's more exhausting and potentially slower
Page title is less important than the text surrounding the term I looked for and the domain name of the site. Bold that, not the keyword I already know; direct my eyes toward info I want.
FavIcon being the only colored element besides Dax stands out too much; put it left of the result like this:
[title]
[summary]
[FavIcon] [summary]
[summary]
[url, mouseover complete url, link from this page]
I'd use my indexer to capture keywords for the result document. I would try to cluster the results based on that, so "man top" returns clusters of linux help and of clothing and the user selects what he meant, filtering out the noise.
I don't know how taxing that would be, but not every page has to be indexed this way. Even 10% of the index having these keywords would be statistically significant to build the clusters. The keywords from this index would be highlighted in the results. Search could be machine tailored in case the user decide to go deeper than the 10%, so as to return documents likely to belong to the cluster, but not processed into it.
I find the contrast to be perfectly fine. But someone with a different monitor can see completely different colours/contrast.
The only thing I can see is maybe slightly making it darker wouldn't hurt anything.
To the extent I still use Google (various products not just search) one thing is constantly happening is that setting options are removed. I find links showing me how to fix what Google has broken and then the settings I can use to do so have seemingly been completely removed by Google :-( This continuing practice has encouraged me to move more and more away from Google. DDG is my default, though still use Google search a fair amount when DDG doesn't give great results or I want to filter by date.
Which is why you chose to write your comment in a low contrast colour.
As you scroll down you see about 50px less vertically devoted to results, a tradeoff easily outweighed by the top suggestion toggle drawer thingy awesomeness.
Unlike the GP, this bothers me about google as well, though.
So I want to search for "apple" and guess what:
I type the letter "a"...
Now the whole page is disrupted, and I have to stop, and check the page, to make sure the sudden change is what I expected it to be. Is the page doing what I intended? I only typed one letter...
Did I actually type the letter "a", or did my finger slip and type the letter "s"? Wait, where's the field? Oh, it's up at the top of the page now... What was I doing? Oh, right, I was going to search for "apple"...
Why did the page change, when I wanted it to stay put, while I complete my thought? Why didn't the page wait until I pressed the enter key, to confirm that I was finished, and ready to search for the intended query?
Do I care about whether the page sends an ordinary post with a form submission, and reloads the page? No.
Do I care about whether the page sends an AJAX request, and is re-rendered by a JavaScript library? No.
I want the page to remain static and reliable while I perform my task. After I'm done typing, it can go crazy, and do whatever.
But if you still don't want your clicks going through the r.duckduckgo.com domain, you can turn it off in the settings.
Presumably you also disable Javascript by default, right?
I see @tripzilch has commented below that he uses a bookmarklet that changes position:fixed elements to position:static. That's probably a better solution than my version which changes them to position:relative. I will have to try that method too.
PLEASE bring them back!
There are also some WCAG guidelines on contrast.
Here are some contrast checkers: http://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ http://www.checkmycolours.com/
If anything should be questioned in hindsight, it should be why so many managers and executives allowed designers to seriously submit such bad ideas for consideration, never mind allowing such unusable designs to actually be implemented.
My suggestion was to implement such an option.
There is some OSM community discussion on the UX behind this here: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/lxbarth/diary/21769
For the OSM data Apple do use, I think it's quite old OSM data from 2010-2011 or something. As far as I remember, they used that because the license changed after that, so I believe that's under different terms.
It has no privacy impact since we do not store or collect personal information.
But the redirection is done over plain HTTP and not HTTPS. If you don't have a wildcard certificate, you could use /r?url=... instead of a subdomain.
Ideally, the best setup would be to use the "noreferrer" attribute on anchor tags. It's a relatively new standard but perhaps you could detect if it's supported and then use that rather than a redirector?
https://www.webkit.org/blog/907/webkit-nightlies-support-htm...
You realize HN comment pages scale pretty well, right? And everyone's happy.
There's no reason a site like DDG shouldn't make better use of larger windows. If someone wants to read long lines across a full-screen window on a 30" display (and I don't), they should be able to. In my case, I'd just like sites to make reasonably good use of a 1280-wide window (half a 30"), which DDG doesn't. That's not unreasonable.
Anyway, here's another good example of a page that scales well:
Presumably these are the same designers who feel a "push" sign next to a nonfunctional handle is a good design for the hardware on a door.
And how long it's taken each time?
That and page-up / page-down. Yes, they're somewhat useful for navigating documents (including webpages).
It's kind of funny that we went from black on grey (netscape), via black on white (ie4) to grey on white (by design/via css) -- rather than simply back to black on grey or grey on black ("console" colors) -- as there's been some studies indicating that darker background leads to less power usage -- which actually has a usability benefit in longer battery life -- all the while maintaining a lower contrast.
There are W3C standards for accessibility for a reason, and widely used sites should follow them.
When I see a site with such low contrast I think "the owner of this site doesn't really care if people actually read the contents" so I usually just close it. Unless I know from a reliable source that the contents is actually something very very interesting, that I would want to read then I'll take the extra effort and try to read it.
I don't know the best way to do this, but I'm thinking a checkbox somewhere near the search bar, or perhaps a prefix similar to "g!" that'll enable it for any further text that's entered, or something along those lines.
http://donttrack.us directly acknowledges that search queries can be used to personally identify individuals.
I therefore understood from the later statement on that site, "[ddg doesn't] store any personal information at all", that this would include search queries: ddg almost literally advertises itself on the fact that it doesn't save search queries. (According to the small print, I understood this wrong.)
It would be a shame if your explanation was the correct one.
That's a terrible reason to pick a design. If you have no justification for a design other than 'lots of other new websites do this', then you have no justification at all... unless your purpose is to blend in and be forgotten.
Personally, I find the new design conveys a more relaxing experience although I'd like to see some of the fonts grow a bit. By modern, I refer to a different online world than #000 against #FFF and skeuo approaches. I'm not saying, those days are over completely, but fresher approaches are nice too.
Let's face it - design will continue to morph based upon different philosophies and whims, just as fashion does. Some visions are worse than others but some are implemented in pretty clever ways. I like the way DDG went with theirs.
For a modern web property or search engine competing against the likes of Google, what timdiggerm mentioned in a reply nails it. Sticking with an older design philosophy conveys a negative image for many users.
However, other properties going flat and subdued do not necessarily get my attention just because everyone else is doing it. This one does though because they did a lot of things right. The more I use next.duckduckgo.com the more I appreciate the small details that were thought out.
Terror and repressed memories are like that, you know.
For example, say I start to type "movie t", it'll see that often times after the word "movie", "times" appears at a high frequency so that could be one of the suggestions. I don't see how this introduces a privacy issue unless they are saving the searches by some personal identification number (whether thats an ip, user id, computer, etc), which they specifically deny. Without the specific identifier, there is no way to say it was user A who searched for "movie times" 300 times in a row and not 300 different users searching for "movie times"
But I want to point out that doing a standard ddg search gives me `https://duckduckgo.com/?q=seattle` , which is a GET command, visible across the entire network as it percolates through, unencrypted.
To state it simple terms: HTTPS protects the URL and all the contents of the connection, but does not protect the fact that you're connecting to a particular domain, the duration of the connection, and the volume of data.
I don't follow that DDG not being able to save anonymous queries disregards their stance on privacy?
Surely for the best experience you'd want DDG to do this anonymously.
