A few weeks ago, we launched the reimagined and redesigned DuckDuckGo. Leading up to the launch was a torrent of excitement, madness, and at least 1000 Asana tasks over the better part of a year. It was a major feat for a staff as small as ours and we're truly proud of our accomplishment. That said, we had some vital (and impressive) help from our community.

Everything from instant answers to translations and other major components are powered by our users. Before the launch of the redesign beta, we wanted to give Community Leaders the first glance at what was coming, so we hosted a Community Leaders' alpha.

The alpha generated some very specific and actionable feedback. One of the many things they helped influence was the visited checkmark that you see next to results you've been to. The iteration before the checkmark was too confusing for people who didn't understand that we get that information from your browser, not by tracking you. The ComLeaders alerted us to that and, within a week, we had a better solution which you see live today. Thank you to our Community Leaders for their consistently tremendous input!

We also engaged our developer community for extra help on the technical side of things and to know which changes were in the works. Our instant answers are open source, so major updates could've caused a lot of confusion with contributors who weren't tuning in every day. We needed to make sure that the updates were reasonable and easily understood by folks who would be seeing them for the first time. We owe a lot to our developer community and would particularly like to point out killerfish, mintsoft, and bradcater for their stellar ability to expand on ideas and move things along in our repositories.

DuckDuckGo doesn't track users, so we heavily rely on feedback to gauge what's broken, what should change, and what should be worked on next. Even with all the preview testing in the world, we knew there would be a lot of new and repeated feedback after launching. We have a variety of feedback channels and our community did an impressive job of helping us triage it. Special thanks to x.15a2 for his initial and undying help on that front!

Without the support of our community, the update to DuckDuckGo would've never been possible. Your ongoing feedback is what inspired the changes and, together, we've created something that people love even more than before than the version before it (a rare thing among technology services). We're looking forward to all the amazing things our community will do next. If you ever have questions or want to engage us or the community-at-large, feel free to stop by our forums!