Usage climbs as pure search engine tries to topple Google
PAOLI, Pa. — Not far from Valley Forge, around the corner from Bravo Pizza, up the road from Paoli Auto Body, there is an odd-looking office building that resembles a stone castle. An eye doctor is on the first floor. On the second floor is a search engine startup.
The proprietor is Gabriel Weinberg, 33. A few years ago, when Weinberg told his wife about his new business idea — pitting him against more established outfits such as Google and Bing — he admits that she briefly thought he was nuts.
“She was like, ‘What are you doing?’ ” Weinberg said. “She thought the idea was crazy.”
Her theory was hard to dispute. A startup taking on Google in search is much like a raft taking on a cruise ship as a vacation option.
But Weinberg is not delusional. With money lining his pockets from selling a startup for $10 million, Weinberg bet there was a place in the market for a product capitalizing on users’ emerging annoyances with Google — its search results gamed by marketers; its pages cluttered with ads; every query tracked, logged and personalized to the point of creepiness.
He called his little search engine project DuckDuckGo, after the children’s game Duck, Duck, Goose. (Instead of “Just Google it,” think “Just Duck it.”)
“My thesis for the company was, ‘What can we do that other search engines, because they’re big, can’t do easily?’ ” Weinberg said. “Because what’s good for Google business is bad for Google users.”
So DuckDuckGo does not track users. It doesn’t generate search results based on a user’s previous interests, potentially filtering out relevant information. It is not cluttered with ads.
In many ways, DuckDuckGo is an homage to the original Google — a pure search engine — and its use is soaring, with searches up from 10 million a month in October 2011 to 45 million last month.
The growth has attracted attention and cash from Union Square Ventures, the venture capital firm behind Twitter.
Not long ago, a headline on the search industry website Search Engine Land asked, “Could DuckDuckGo Be the Biggest Long-Term Threat To Google?”
Scrutiny on Google
The attention to DuckDuckGo comes as U.S. and European Union officials are stepping up scrutiny into Google’s search practices, which have been criticized for unfairly elbowing out competitors’ content and results in favor of its own.
This year, in a response to criticism that it was acting monopolistically, Google publicly identified DuckDuckGo as a competitor — a move that pleased and entertained Weinberg but that also reflected a bit of hyperbole about just how close DuckDuckGo is to truly competing.
Google processes billions of searches a day. DuckDuckGo processes millions.
“The reality in the United States is that we still really only have two search engines — Google and Bing,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land. “I think it’s entirely unlikely that DuckDuckGo is gonna put Google on its back and crush it.”
But what if that’s not really Weinberg’s goal?
Weinberg started his first company while a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — a portal for teachers to put lesson plans online. He was too early. He failed.
While living in Boston, he started another company after graduating — a database where users could submit their e-mail addresses and other people could pay to get in touch with them. It was called NamesDatabase.
“I’ve never been that good with names,” Weinberg said. NamesDatabase did not fail. In 2006, he sold it to Classmates.com for $10 million.
Weinberg started DuckDuckGo while his wife worked and he captained the house. The company was based at home until last year, when he raised money from Union Square.
He is joined at his new office — in the office that looks like a castle — by several coders, one of whom brings his dog, Hex.
Practical results
DuckDuckGo’s office differs from flashier startup offices in that there is no fancy Fiji bottled water. Weinberg serves Costco water. “I’ve always been pretty cheap,” he said. “We’re pretty practical around here.”
Practicality. That’s what Weinberg was after when he started DuckDuckGo. He wanted to build a search engine that people could use quickly and purely.
He wanted to focus especially on the first two or three results that users saw, but he didn’t have a lot of manpower to build a search engine from scratch.
Weinberg decided to use publicly available search results from Yahoo — which is now fueled by Bing — for the bulk of his searches and use his programming talents to curate the top few links. He wanted those links to provide answers.
Going to Google and typing “calories in a banana” will produce a page of links about bananas. Going to DuckDuckGo and typing “calories in a banana” will produce an answer: 105. The answer comes from WolframAlpha, a computational database that Weinberg linked to DuckDuckGo.
He has linked hundreds of millions of popular searches to other outside data sources, such as Wikipedia and Yelp.
Searching for “irritable bowel syndrome” on Google produces three ads as the top three links. The same search on DuckDuckGo produces three links about the disease from Wikipedia.
“If you can control the top three links, you’re actually controlling 80 to 90 percent of searches,” he said.
While Weinberg’s answer system was intentional, his focus on privacy was not. It simply didn’t occur to him that he would ever need to track users. Why? Because his business model would eventually call for serving up just one or two easy-to-miss ads based on the search query, which would generate enough revenue, he thought, to build a nice little business that one day might grab 1 percent of the search market — about five times what he’s got now.
“It’s never been my interest to maximize revenue,” he said. “I like the Craigslist model. Stay lean. Focus on doing what you do well.”
Meanwhile, privacy has bubbled up as an issue online. A recent Pew Research survey found that 65 percent of Internet users see tracking as a “bad thing,” and 73 percent thought it is an invasion of privacy.
Weinberg quickly incorporated his site’s trackless virtues into the minimal amount of marketing he does.
He paid $7,000 to put up a billboard in San Francisco that features his company’s smiling duck logo and says, “Google tracks you. We don’t.” Clicking on the “about” link on the site’s home page brings users to a link that says, “We don’t track you,” and that brings users to a page that features pictures from Google searches.
Seizing on opportunity
Weinberg’s unambitious goals make him a particularly odd and dangerous competitor online. He can do almost everything that Google or Bing can’t because it could damage their business models, and if users figure out that they like the DuckDuckGo way better, Weinberg could damage the big boys without even really trying. It’s asymmetrical digital warfare, and his backers at Union Square Ventures say Google is vulnerable.
“We think it’s the right time and the right platform to take a crack at this market,” said Brad Burnham, managing partner of Union Square.
“At what point does the breadth of Google’s ambitions begin to diminish its focus on its core asset and open up an opportunity for a competitor?
“There will be an evolution in the marketplace that opens an opportunity for others. I’m not ready to cede to Google the dominant position in search until the end of time.”