I think ddg is a great initiative and like how you are going about it. I have been following ddg quite a bit and also on the reddit ads/postings. With a slightly long term view and clear focus I think it has a decent chance to compete with the big guys.
Having said that, there are two things I noticed which I don't completely agree with.
1. The interface - the fonts, layout on the first page somehow is very unreadable. I am not sure what the motivation behind this is, but imho even a copy of hte exact google serp fonts/layout should have been good enough. The only way ddg will stand out from Google is the quality of data on your serp. There is very little incremental innovation possible from the layout that Google already has for listing a list of links and text, and it also doesnt seem to be your focus anyways.
2. I think the auto extension of search results is a bad interface choice. A pagination interface provides a clear anchoring and also for most people the first 10 results are more than enough - anything more and the information becomes too overwhelming. Again I dont think this provides any more value from the Google interface and is bad from a cognitive overload viewpoint.
Thx for the detailed constructive criticism. On 1, I disagree with the premise that you can't improve UI. It's a subjective thing but I strongly believe a non-negligible % of people would prefer a different UI.
That being said, wrt to fonts and sizes, I wonder if you like any arrangement after tweaking the settings? http://duckduckgo.com/settings.html
On 2, I get way more positive feedback on this than negative, perhaps 10/1, though I do agree there are issues around the edges.
I know I've said this before, but the infinite scroll always catches me out.
I often brush on the trackpad to get to the bottom of the page. If there isn't a bottom of the page, it just freaks me out. It makes me think something's broken. Maybe I'm just an outlier though ;)
My hunch is that most of the feedback is from technicaly inclined people and most of them are expressing the 'coolness' of the infinite scroll rather than a coginitive-usability perspective. Maybe try doing a feedback round with non-technical people, possibly with something like usertesting.org. Also, the infinite scroll is a pretty old paradigm and Google would have definitely run it through its user tests, but htey obviously dont find a lot of value in it.
I agree on 1, and I think that what works well for Google & co is the strong colors. Every hit starts with blue and ends with green. You don't have to pick the same colors, but I think that's what makes it easy for me to distinguish the results.
I also think that the results start way too long down. I want to see my top three results in, well, the top.
Subjectively agree with 1. I find that each result doesn't seem separate enough, as if it was just a bunch of text and not individual results.
Subjectively and strongly disagree with 2. I love being able to just scroll down to the second page of results, it saves a few clicks and lets me scroll quickly through a bunch of results so I can quickly gauge the quality of the search terms.
Been thinking of adding a setting to add a small dashed line in between results. I wonder what you think about this? If you have firebug installed, search for something then add 1px dashed #AAAAAA to .cr1 & .cr1d.
I'd recommend two other solutions before adding the dashed line.
1. Increase the contrast (could be lightness, saturation, size, or a combination of the those) between the link titles and preview text. Right now they are similar enough that when I scan the page, I see block, block, block... instead of link, link, link...(which is how I think it should read). If you look at Google or even Reddit, the links are bright enough that you can scan the link titles without noticing the preview text and/or meta info.
2. Increase the whitespace between each block to create more separation.
I think #1 is more important because link-scanning will still be a problem if you add whitespace or the dashed line.
In my opinion, it's best to use spacing, alignment, and contrast to separate objects before adding new objects to act as seperators.
Thx, this is why I haven't done it to date. The link colors were actually brighter, but people kept complaining about them being too bright, which is how they got to where they are now. But I'll give that another look.
Wrt to spacing, there is actually quite a bit and I get a lot of complaints about there not being enough spacing, though I made a setting for that. I'll also revisit.
