Thanks for the feedback. We agree that speed is incredibly important, and we're working on making searches much faster. We'll be iterating on the UI/UX as well, as we think that we can definitely do better and be more efficient with space.
I'd love to hear more about what you mean by "informationally dense" -- some search engines simply show more information on the results page, but that doesn't make results inherently better in my opinion because it frequently simply increases noise relative to signal.
Our current approach is to provide only the most relevant answers/code snippets and nothing else (high signal with low noise) as opposed to cramming in every Stack Overflow answer we can find. We realize we still have a long way to go to make it magical for every search, but we're working on it.
Consistent, non-moving (as things load) UI is super important. Also something that bugged me but I didn't realize why until now: don't use the full width for the description under links (or the titles for that matter). We've known for some time now that if you make text too wide it becomes harder to read.
My suggestions:
* Kill the padding/margins, it's pretty for demos or certain cases but I want to be able to see more information, heavy padding/margins have no place in search results.
* Shrink the search bar to the upper left like every other search engine. Keeping it centered with tons of padding wastes space. Take your logo and put it to the left of the search field, take the buttons and put them to the right. On my screen you are burning a little over 500px of vertical space with things that don't matter, the results matter.
* Shrink your "regular" search results to be half the width of the screen (on desktop, something like a max of 700, Google uses ~640 as does Ecosia). Use the space to the right to show your AI/ML results. This means no content will jump around and people can more easily read the results, full-width is very hard to read. Also shorten the "description" under the links. 2 lines max (at 640px width).
* Either don't ask "Was this answer helpful?" (use hints like: Did they click the link? Did they leave the site after seeing the results?) OR don't make it move the content (hold the space empty if you must animate it in, just don't let the content shift multiple times after doing a search).
Yes, I removed the logo/buttons because that was faster than moving them to the left/right of the search but the end result is the same. In my tightened up version you can fit 8+ result links where the initial version could only show 3, also all the results are easier to read.
> some search engines simply show more information on the results page, but that doesn't make results inherently better in my opinion because it frequently simply increases noise relative to signal.
But if the "automatic" answer fails and I need to skim results, as I'll often need to do, you put 3 result previews in a space DDG and Google fit 5. They also apply reasonable defaults for the max line length - a basic typography thing that improves quick readability a lot.
I'd love to hear more about what you mean by "informationally dense" -- some search engines simply show more information on the results page, but that doesn't make results inherently better in my opinion because it frequently simply increases noise relative to signal.
Our current approach is to provide only the most relevant answers/code snippets and nothing else (high signal with low noise) as opposed to cramming in every Stack Overflow answer we can find. We realize we still have a long way to go to make it magical for every search, but we're working on it.