Firstly thanks @Archit for the vote of confidence. It’s encouraging that you, and others here, recognise our efforts to build whilst sticking to our principles.
It would be great to hear from others on the suggestions and topics you highlighted. Your feedback is much appreciated and these are all important points. I share some thoughts on each:
Design: We did a big update of the whole site design this year, but not the SERPs and home page. We had planned to move to this next but other major projects had to take priority. Are you using desktop, mobile or both?
Image Search: The current image search uses the Pixabay API and was put in as quick win
sometime ago. The lack of images meant that we put Bing as an alternative. We certainly don’t want to put Bing as the default for everybody. We get quite a lot of people pointing out that perhaps we should avoid using Bing;it’s a view which clearly resonates with us. So it’s something we would like to move away from but we need to do significant work to do that, and have an impact. This has been considered but it not yet a time planned project.
Ads: As you likely know we have a Beta contextual ads program. We have seen a big demand from small advertisers. We are well aware of the Yep approach; we are unconvinced but will let them test out that model. DuckDuckGo have proved that the contextual search ads model can work, so our next step would be to return to that; the difference is that we do not depend on the Microsoft ad network nor need to pass on data to othe parties.
Roadmap: This is a good shout and something we have not considered enough.
Infobox: We do understand the general, and often conditioned, desire for this and the need for convenience. However we are wary here as it can lead one to breaking the open web; others have, and are increasingly, moving from being a search engine to an answer engine. Mojeek Focus can do a lot of the work here for you, though it takes more effort. We are considering how to further tackle this challenge so we’d be interested to learn what specific information you, and others, would like to see.
Thanks for sharing your privacy journey. Two points to be commented upon here:
Sadly this is very true. I call it privacy-washing for shorthand.
There is further to travel for all of us as I’ll try to explain. Whilst the need for privacy search “engines” has long been recognised but this is not enough in my opinion. We all need and would benefit from search which not only provides privacy, but also more autonomy for users and diversity of information sources. We may move more slowly than VC funded companies, who have bigger resources, but also because we recognise that all three aspects are crucial for our information age. Without independence it relatively easy to provide privacy (washing) search. Serious autonomy for users and true diversity of search results requires independence.