3.5 years in, Valley Forge search engine DuckDuckGo raises funding

According to a post on Union Square Ventures’ blog, Gabe Weinberg’s two-man Valley Forge-based search firm DuckDuckGo has received an as yet undisclosed sum in a Series A round led by the 67th ward firm. From the post:

I remember clearly when a friend first pointed me to Google, it was a revelation. Using it was a palpably better experience. As part of the process of evaluating DuckDuckGo, several of us switched our default search engines in Chrome (there’s simple how-to instructions below the search box on DuckDuckGo’s homepage), and had a similar “ah ha” moment. The company is young and under staffed so there are definitely holes Gabriel hopes to fill, but his observation that “traditional algorithmic signals are not the only authority on the web,” and his clever use of real authorities to curate search results makes Duck Duck Go an interesting alternative to your everyday brand.

Weinberg has also written about the funding on his personal blog.

Startup Roundup: myYearbook Chatter feed surpasses 1 million posts per day, Duck Duck Go whups Cuil

Introducing Technically Philly’s Startup Roundup. Here, we’ll parse out the small pieces that make our greater Startup ecosystem thrive. We want to keep you in touch with the innovations that we can’t quite get to covering, but that deserve highlight. Follow along with the Startup Roundup’s dedicated RSS feed. If you’ve got news to share, get in touch.

DEFINITE READS

myYearbook has announced that its real-time location-based Chatter stream feature—launched last November—receives 1 million posts per day. According to a press release, two new features, which allow users to ask questions and rate each other, ala HotOrNot.com, have accelerated the stream’s growth rate. myYearbook’s traffic continues to grow at an impressive rate, with over 55 million monthly visits and 4.3 million unique visitors.

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Duck Duck Go launches shopping search filter to test advertising waters

Valley Forge-based Duck Duck Go has updated its snappy, no-frills search engine with the option to filter shopping results.

By typing a query and choosing between shopping, information and normal- mode, you can decide whether you’re looking to buy, looking for info or something in between.

“A top complaint about search engines is that you often have trouble finding real information about topics that have lots of shopping results,” Founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg said in a statement. “We built this new feature to address that problem.”

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 38 percent of users say they are unaware that search results are a mix of search content and sponsored links.

Currently, Duck Duck Go displays no sponsored advertisements, but in an interview with Technically Philly last month, Founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg said the company was planning to monetize the site with ads.
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Friday Q&A: Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of Duck Duck Go

Duck Duck Go. It’s a name that’s sure to bring the Valley Forge-based search engine company attention just by folks trying to figure out what it means.

Some have called it silly. Others have mentioned a common childhood game by the same name.

CEO Gabriel Weinberg says it isn’t named after anything special.

“I wish I had a good answer for you. I don’t. It came to me one day and I really liked it,” he says during a telephone interview.

If anything, Duck Duck Go is just something different. In the Web search industry, that’s important. It might be one of few ways of chiseling away at Google’s dominating market share the search giant currently queries 63 percent of U.S. searches.

That’s OK with 29-year-old Weinberg. He says Duck Duck Go offers features Google can’t: uncluttered, human-sourced, friggin’ fast search results. Direct to you from the ‘burbs.

Last week, the company unveiled its Firefox toolbar, a search tool that redirects users from parked domains and spam sites, part of Duck Duck Go’s fight against typo squatting. It’s the second Duck Duck Go-branded software release, the first, a search app for Apple’s iPhone. Traffic has been good to the company, increasing steadily month by month, Weinberg says.

We spoke with Weinberg about what makes Duck Duck Go special, how the two-employee company plans to continue growing, and his vision of the future of search, after the jump.

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