For speed, just this week we upgraded our whole caching system, which should significantly speed up a lot of queries. I'd be interested to know if anyone has noticed any difference over the past day or so. This change should equalize a lot of the location differences, which is the main issue. In some parts of the world we were way slower.
In response to a lot of the comments here, please know that two major things we're working on are better programming queries (https://duckduckgo.com/tech.html -- one of my new favorites https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa) and speed.
For speed, just this week we upgraded our whole caching system, which should significantly speed up a lot of queries. I'd be interested to know if anyone has noticed any difference over the past day or so. This change should equalize a lot of the location differences, which is the main issue. In some parts of the world we were way slower.
Also, for anyone wanting to get involved we've been open sourcing more and more (https://github.com/duckduckgo). We're working on better entry points, but one could start here now: https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki. For programming documentation in particular, this is the repo: https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-fathead. That will answer queries like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=perl+split
On the back-end we could also use some sysadmin help :). Here's our hiring info: http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216387
Of course, we're also always looking for feedback, the more detailed/specific the better: https://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html