14 DAY TRIAL // The good folks at DuckDuckGo have just announced that their unique search engine has been “reimagined and redesigned” based on users feedback gathered over the past year.
According to the developers, the new version of DuckDuckGo is aimed at offering users better answers for their searches, along with a “more refined look.”
But that is not all, as many under the hood changes meant to improve users’ experience even further have been implemented in the latest version of DuckDuckGo.
The new DuckDuckGo is offered as beta until all the eventual bugs are fixed and the search engine gets tweaked for the best performance and search results.
Among the most important new features mentioned by the team of devs, it’s worth highlighting that DuckDuckGo now supports images, auto-suggest and places. But do no fret, as all these do not come at the expense of privacy, which continues to be protected.
However, given the fact that it’s still in beta, DuckDuckGo also comes with a few known issues, which are expected to be fixed in future updates. Here is the complete (short) list of known issues confirmed by the developers:
- not all settings work yet and the setting page itself is getting an overhaul; - not all instant answers work yet and some have not yet been redesigned; - IE8 is functional though not fully cleaned up yet.
The team behind DuckDuckGo says that in the next month, it is hoping to make this beta iteration the default version of the search engine, but that will mostly depend on users’ feedback.
For those who have never heard or used DuckDuckGo, this is one of the few, if not the only, search engines that offer users complete privacy over their searches.
Unlike other major search engines that are focusing on offering search results based on each user’s preferences, DuckDuckGo shows all users the same search results regardless of their previous search history.
According to developers, DuckDuckGo gets information from other search engines like Yahoo! and Bing, but it also uses huge databases like Wikipedia in order to offer the best search results. If you are paranoiac about your privacy, we encourage you to give DuckDuckGo a try and submit your feedback to the developers.