What I like about DDG:
- Somebody is trying to improve the search engine space which is too long dominated by just one party (which admittedly makes a damn good job)
What I don't like:
- I don't see any improvements
- Don't like their name
- Crappy logo
- Too long domain name (with some skills and little money, a great 4-letter dot com is a no brainer)
- The product is awkward to use: the entire UI is the #1 reason to leave and aesthetically not pleasing, too many colors (red, blue, green), no CI, favicons are distracting, screen real estate isn't used effectively, mouse over effects are distracting and feel like clumsy Web 2.0 sites in 2005 => even Bing's new interface is very much nicer
- Search results got better but seem to lack any relevance algorithm such as Google's Pagerank
- Shortcuts are nice but more some kind of an gimmick than real revolution and they are not helpful at all because people who do not use DDG regularly forget them: either they have to be displayed all the time somewhere next to the results or directly on the landing page or they have to be consistent and expressive as Google's syntax which is "site: query"—if this shortcuts are one of DDG's main features then they have to tell it.
- No autocomplete, no instant search
I think DDG's and the team main problem is a heavy lack of product vision—they just think search is a great business model (yes it is) and they want to do something to just be better than the market leader. And this 'something' is their biggest weakness, they just don't know what to improve, on what to focus. Google's search is so good, that it's gonna hard to improve but still there are some fields where Google can be beaten (anonymous search, irrelevant results for longer queries because of SEO gaming/blackhat). Instead they just brought up a really ugly design and the user wonders all the 15 seconds he's exploring DDG why he should use DDG.
DDG has to pick one of Google's weaknesses and focus just on this and they have also to position DDG accordingly and communicate this focus/USP heavily. Otherwise DDG is like G+ to FB, just a bad copy.
I can image how hard it must be to build a search engine from scratch, there's just too much tech involved and crawling all the web could take months even if you have hundreds of servers (imagine: Google crawls even smaller sites with more than 20,000 pages per day (!), how does anyone want to build such crawling power with little VC money and some hype posts from Fred Wilson??). But maybe that's the chance: a new player has to focus on something small—a feature, a content niche, whatever, just a MVP that is in its core much, much better than Google. Building and promising the entire Google search experience will lead to fail.