It’s been almost a year since the Edward Snowden leaks about all the NSA spying, and ever since that time privacy and no-tracking have become a number one concern for Internet users. While in competition with Google and Bing, search engine DuckDuckGo, which is self-described as, "The search engine that doesn't track you," has made privacy its main focus, and has undergone a newly introduced "redesign" and has incorporated several new changes as well.

We’ve been following DuckDuckGo’s progress for a while now, and according to the site’s traffic map, the search engine’s usage has dramatically increased since the NSA revelations. DuckDuckGo is unique in comparison to other search engines in that it does not profile its users, and it also deliberately shows all users the same search results for a given search query. The site also emphasizes getting information from the best sources rather than the most sources, and its search results are generated from key crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia and from partnerships with other search engines like Yandex, Yahoo!, Bing and WolframAlpha.

On Monday, in a DuckDuckGo community forum post, the site’s founder, Gabriel Weinberg, posted, "We'd like to show you how we've incorporated your feedback with a reimagined and redesigned DuckDuckGo." He states, "This next version of DuckDuckGo focuses on smarter answers and a more refined look. We've also added many new features you've been requesting like images, auto-suggest, places and more. Of course, your privacy is protected as well!"

While still in beta, the “DuckDuckGo” team still has some issues they are working to resolve, which they outline as follows:

• Not all settings work yet and the setting page itself is getting an overhaul
• Not all instant answers work yet and some have not yet been redesigned
• IE8 is functional though not fully cleaned up yet

Some of the notable changes we've seen are the text links, the search results themselves and how they are displayed, and the addition of images and videos which now appear at the top left once the initial query has been made. The team suggests that in order to really test the search engine, you should make it your default which can easily be done now on the bottom of the search engine main page.

To learn more about DuckDuckGo, you can refer to the about page which provides additional details as well as some history. The team also welcomes and encourages feedback from its users.

We’re impressed with the progress we’ve seen so far, always keeping in mind that our privacy is number one.