In terms of queries, it's really good at nouns, i.e. people, places and things. The reason for that is for those types of queries there is usually good Zero-click Info including a topic summary, often an image, and many times related topic and category links for discovery.

More generally, I think we have a compelling UI with less clutter and spam. I think that's why we've gotten traction and have a growing user base who uses it as their primary search engine.

In terms of crawlpower how is DDG going on? how wide is its crawl data base?

We're a hybrid search engine, which means we do our own crawling and indexing but also rely on third party crawling and indexing. I started out before those third party APIs existed, and so was doing everything myself.

But when they came out and after talking to users extensively, I decided to drop most of that and concentrate on our value-ads, which I see as Zero-click Info, less spam and higher relevancy. At this point, we mainly crawl for those purposes only. So while we hit about 100M domains a month, it's mostly for detecting and removing spam. Most of our deep results are provided by Bing, Boss, and EntireWeb, which we re-rank and merge with our Zero-click info indexes (that also include some links).