With a responsive new look and impressive search features that can rival the likes of Google and Bing, DuckDuckGo could very well be the very first little search engine that could.

When Gabriel Weinberg founded DuckDuckGo in 2008, the small yet spunky search engine never became known outside its circle of developer fans. Following Edward Snowden's leaks on government surveillance, the private search engine's user base shot up. However, the fact remained that DuckDuckGo has always been a little too simplistic. Other search engines had images and a variety of widgets, such as for maps, ratings and Wikipedia cards. DuckDuckGo only turned relevant results, albeit quickly and without recording your IP address or your search history.

All that has changed today, as DuckDuckGo finally announced a variety of improvements. You will still be able to search anonymously, that's for sure, but this time, you can now search images, videos and places, receive auto-suggestions for your searches and get instant answers for fact-based questions. For example, searching for "convert 300 ml to cups" gives you a direct answer right away - "1,268 cups, assuming cups is U.S. customary cups."

Weinberg says the company is now laying the groundwork for DuckDuckHack, its own "open-source instant answer platform" where anyone can contribute ideas or code. He also said that the answer bar can present multiple answers, depending on how many have contributed to answer the question.

DuckDuckGo also added search for weather and recipes, it also displays a map when you're searching places. For instance, you can search for "New York City Mexican Restaurants" and it will bring up a map of all the places in the Big Apple offering Mexican food, including their names, addresses, phone numbers and Yelp ratings.

The revamped search engine also includes a Meanings bar, which helps you narrow down a non-specific search. You can search for the word "queen" and DuckDuckGo will ask you if you're referring to the band, the chess piece or the monarch.  

"Our hope is that our focus on smarter search and real privacy will appeal to a significant percentage of people. It's certainly what we and our community want in our search engine!" writes DuckDuckGo in its blog post.

DuckDuckGo now hosts up to 150 million monthly searches, three times the number of searches it had just a year ago. However, it still has a long, long way to go before it can catch up with Google's 100 billion searches every month.

The updates are now available on the site's desktop and mobile websites and will also be rolled out for DuckDuckGo's iOS and Android apps.