lower contrast is not bad, I don't want all text to be #000 and #fff, but the contrast on DuckDuckGo is too low. As it says here your text should be as readable as #333 on #fff: http://ia.net/blog/100e2r/

There are also some WCAG guidelines on contrast.

Here are some contrast checkers: http://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ http://www.checkmycolours.com/