DuckDuckHack is a major component of DuckDuckGo's future. It's great when developers, well versed in an answer space, come in and make a goodie because the value spreads across the user base. As DDH grows, it will be neat to think of as a standard library for future contributors to work with. For example a mortgage specific calculator leveraging the generic calculator.
We originally prototyped videos with several providers including Vimeo, YouTube, and DailyMotion. Sadly there was an immediate (and difficult) safe search problem and we decided to table re-enabling the others until after we got some feedback about how it worked.
We were on the fence about autocomplete for a variety of reasons, but tried to be careful about minimizing distraction. It was too great a vector to introduce !bang autocomplete :). As always, please let us know what you think as it evolves!
Cool! We always received a fair amount of feedback about better local search and the redesign attempts to plug a few holes. Any feedback would be great; we're just getting started!
A lot of our employees don't use LinkedIn. A leadership / core team page is on the horizon, but we've been working on cooler / product stuff :). As others have said, we're ~20 people; ~75% remote. I think our unique approach to hiring (inbound / sparingly) has helped us form an excellent team where, once a core team member is added, trust is just built-in. I can't stress enough how important that is to delivering on our mission with a small team.
It's not a filter bubble because by default everyone sees the exact same content, just like our Web search results. We decided early on to filter out things like rape, dismemberment, etc. that we thought were staunchly negative. Also, this app wasn't designed to be a traditional news reader. Instead it features interesting content that's currently being shared a lot regardless of publish date.
Stories are showcased from over 50 carefully selected sources that focus on different types of content. For example, TIME and BBC are there, but so are Reddit Funny and BuzzFeed. We also aggressively prevent depressing and duplicate stories from appearing in the feed.
Thanks for the feedback. We take the ability to search fast very seriously. There are a few home screen options in the app -- just look at the settings. Also our mobile web site is still accessible and maybe preferred over the app altogether.
In addition to the mixed content issue on Chrome, I've pushed out a fix for the tab completion component. It too inherently suffers from mixed content because our autocomplete server only does HTTP at the moment.