As Google Tinkers with Search, Upstarts Gain Ground

Searches on DuckDuckGo grew steadily but slowly since its launch four years ago, particularly amongst the startup community, but after a visual redesign in January they exploded. Between then and early April, usage of the site increased more than threefold, according to the site's public traffic logs, from 450,000 queries a day to over 1.5 million. Visits have continued to grow since, but at a slower pace.

Blekko, launched in 2010 and now with 42 full-time employees and a total of over $50 million in investment funding, has a similar story. It doesn't share usage statistics, but according to Compete, which estimates website usage using various indirect sources of information, visits to the site have, since January, charted an upward swing that looks close to exponential. Blekko now has 2.31 million unique users every month, according to Compete, a figure that, although unlikely to be exact, compares impressively with other sites. Blekko is more popular than better-known "Knowledge engine" Wolfram Alpha, for example, which is visited by only 462,000 people a month, according to Compete, and DuckDuckGo, which receives 257,000 visitors monthly. These figures are still tiny compared to Google's 161 million and Bing's 122 million monthly unique visitors. Google's visitors do the most searchers; according to Compete, 65 percent of U.S. Web searches are done on Google and 18 percent on Bing.

Blekko cofounder and CEO Rich Skrenta says that media stories about search in general or about changes made by Google typically correlate with spikes in Blekko's traffic.

Google's launch in January of Search, plus Your World, which delivers each person different search results based on the activity of his or her online contacts, is one example. Skrenta says it went against what some users expect of their search engine. "It's kind of like if we all read a different version of the New York Times every morning." Skrenta points out that Google added a "hide personal results" button along with those changes, saying "maybe they're kind of nervous you might want the old view."

Weinberg says that, by complicating its traditionally sparse design, Google caused people to look elsewhere. "That definitely drove things up for us," he says. "People reacted to that negatively."

Google's new privacy policy, announced in February, also gave the two startups a boost. Both Blekko and DuckDuckGo say they are committed to avoiding personalization and anything that leads to the same query yielding different results for different people. "Two years ago, no one cared if you had a good privacy policy, but privacy has been a big deal more recently. You tell your search engine things you wouldn't tell your wife or minister," says Skrenta.

Blekko anonymizes search data after 48 hours, compared to the 18 months that Google retains such information. "If law enforcement show up

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