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New DuckDuckGo design

duckduckgo.com

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Re: New DuckDuckGo design

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I search "Baptiste Mispelon" in Google, the first three results are: (1) Ad for Christianity (2) GitHub Profile (3) Twitter Profile When I search the same thing on DuckDuckGo, the first three results are: (1) Twitter Profile (2) LinkedIn Profile (3) GitHub Profile I definitely think that the first couple of results on DuckDuckGo are as useful as those produced by Google, if not more so.

Strange, I don't see any ads at the top :O on Google. I have no ad blocker enabled.

I didn't get an ad either. With my search order being Github, twitter, photos, linkedin.

Re: New DuckDuckGo design

#133
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.

Re: New DuckDuckGo design

#134
post #102

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

This is due to patents. I blogged a solution some while ago, but since then removed my the entire blog, here is a raw paste of the original commit: https://gist.github.com/klrr/73ce6da0fb6947ed92a5

Re: New DuckDuckGo design

#135
post #83

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 pic…

When I search "Baptiste Mispelon" in Google, the first three results are: (1) Ad for Christianity (2) GitHub Profile (3) Twitter Profile When I search the same thing on DuckDuckGo, the first three results are: (1) Twitter Profile (2) LinkedIn Profile (3) GitHub Profile I definitely think that the first couple of results on DuckDuckGo are as useful as those produced by Google, if not more so.

Google may provide results that are more relevant based on you looking for someone you are in a community with, whose pages you are searching for are relevant based on searches you have made.

This specifically relies on keeping information about you that DDG won't.

Re: New DuckDuckGo design

#136
post #134
post #102

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

This is due to patents. I blogged a solution some while ago, but since then removed my the entire blog, here is a raw paste of the original commit: https://gist.github.com/klrr/73ce6da0fb6947ed92a5

My settings already include antialiasing and hinting (with medium level). The only difference I see is that in your configuration autohint is true across all fonts (not in mine). I enabled it for a few fonts only, since it's recommended not to use it for all:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_Configuration#Auto...

> The Autohinter attempts to do automatic hinting and disregards any existing hinting information. Originally it was the default because TrueType2 fonts were patent-protected but now that these patents have expired there's very little reason to use it. It does work better with fonts that have broken or no hinting information but it will be strongly sub-optimal for fonts with good hinting information. Generally common fonts are of the later kind so autohinter will not be useful.

Anyway, I don't think it's related to the shifted letter "i".

By the way, how does fontconfig translate to the Web fonts? Is there any way to affect them through it on the individual basis and not with global configuration?

UPDATE: Just found this: https://necoro.wordpress.com/2013/04/29/matching-web-fonts-w...

Re: New DuckDuckGo design

#137
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all cases, the font size makes it hard to read. Seems like increasing the font size just helps. Thanks though!

The detailed descriptions on DDG and Google are both exactly the same size, 13px. I think the people complaining about these visual issues are imagining things.

Font size isn't exactly comparable across different font families. In the case of DDG they are using DDG_ProximaNova, while in the case of Google they are using Arial.

Arial is much easier to read on Chrome for Windows over DDG_ProximaNova.

I also just noticed that we can change the font on the settings page, just feel like it shouldn't be necessary.

Re: New DuckDuckGo design

#138

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

We have implemented a bunch of the feedback from the original discussion. Detailed release notes were posted in the forum: https://duck.co/forum/thread/5747/duckduckgo-beta-refinement... https://duck.co/forum/thread/5851/duckduckgo-beta-refinement... We also added themes (in the side menu) to address some of the feedback on contrast. Classic theme reverts to the color scheme of the old site. And you can fine tune the…

Thanks! I'd totally miss the themes functionality if not for your comment. Just switched to Dark to match my desktop theme and it looks perfect. I hope more themes will be added in the future.

Re: New DuckDuckGo design

#139
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.

Re: New DuckDuckGo design

#140
post #83

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 pic…

This is what I see on DDG search page: http://i.imgur.com/Ec4sCKp.png

Everything position seems relevant, and first 6 are good sources of personal contact info.

Not bad.

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