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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