I just finished reading Steve Souders' High Performance Web Sites. As I looked at DDG's sites, I wondered several things.

On the home page, why is the rest of the page minimized, while options aren't minimized? That seems a bit odd to me.

If you use apache, is mod_delate configured to gzip or deflate content served through HTTP?

Are Etags disabled?

If anyone is interested in learning more about this (I was), definitely check out http://stevesouders.com/hpws/. It's ~150 pages of awesome.

EDIT: I ran Firebug with the YSlow extension. This answered a lot of these. DDG gets a 97/100. That's pretty nice.

Where DDG could improve according to YSlow:

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

• https://duckduckgo.com/s276.css
• https://duckduckgo.com/d365.js
• https://duckduckgo.com/nduck.v104.party.png
• https://duckduckgo.com/sbutton.v101.green.png

Avoid CSS expressions

• https://duckduckgo.com/s276.css

(Possible) Make JavaScript and CSS external

• There are a total of 1 inline css
• There are a total of 4 inline scripts

I hope this helps.