I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine and have had a positive experience using it. 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, altho…
Thanks for the feedback! Our current version also has a fixed header, and that can be turned off in the settings, which we plan to make work in this next version as well. Noted on contrast. We will look into it more -- that's exactly the kind of feedback we were hoping to get.
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.