The positioning of sponsored links makes me very sad. I use j/k/enter to navigate most of the time, and this means that I need to worry about accidentally selecting a link with a near-100% probability of being completely useless to me. (It's really annoying when it's the first link, because I can't just press 'enter' to go to it.)
It also wastes a lot of screen space on a smaller screen, especially when the zero-click info box is there. Being able to see only 1-2 useful results instead of 2-3 is annoying.
I've been using DDG for over a year now as my primary search engine, and I like it quite a lot. I understand the need to make money, but I'm going to be very sad if I have to go find a new search engine because ads have compromised the UI.
The previous ads on the right were taking up more space than this new sponsored link and they weren't being seen much, resulting in essentially zero effectiveness. Additionally, we continually get requests for actually having sponsored links in-line because when relevant they often add something to the result set.
So what we hoped to do is kill three birds with one stone: a) add in a relevant sponsored link (work in progress); b) generate real revenue to make the service self-sustainable (while still keeping it as minimal as possible); c) reclaim the space on the right side for more interesting interactions (more to come).
We've been testing this for a while on some traffic and it has preformed well with essentially zero complaint. We realize there will be some people who don't want it, which is why there is a setting to turn if off (ad block works too).
Also, the whole page has been compressed up so really it shouldn't be taking much more vertical space. In other words, with the smaller default fonts and other spacing changes that height has been removed from the page rendering it more of a wash with # of results on the page.
It also wastes a lot of screen space on a smaller screen, especially when the zero-click info box is there. Being able to see only 1-2 useful results instead of 2-3 is annoying.
I've been using DDG for over a year now as my primary search engine, and I like it quite a lot. I understand the need to make money, but I'm going to be very sad if I have to go find a new search engine because ads have compromised the UI.