Posts from Web search engine

Indeed

The first great investment we made at USV was Indeed in the summer of 2005. Brad had been looking for a search engine for jobs and I saw this post on John Battelle's blog in late 2004. I forwarded it to Brad and he reached out to Paul and Rony. It took two tries before we could convince them to take our money. They had bootstrapped the company, launched the service, and were well on their way. They didn't need our money. But eventually we convinced them to take it, along with the New York Times Company and our friends at Allen & Company.

Indeed has always been the quiet one. Nobody really talks about them. But as I have said a number of times on this blog, they are the most complete company in our portfolio. They have it all. Two world class entrepreneurs as founders. A solid management team all up and down the company. A product that is beloved and services more than 80mm people worldwide every month. An engineering team that has kept the service up with literally no down time that I can ever remember. A business model that, like Google's, is the best on the Internet. Revenues, profits, customer satisfaction, shareholder value. They built a fortress and I am just so happy to have had a front row seat watching them build it.

The quiet one is the one that can do a big M&A transaction over the summer without anyone finding out. The quiet one is the one that puts out the news on their blog and goes back to serving customers. The quiet one is the first great investment we made at USV and one that will always have a special place in my heart. Congrats to Paul, Rony, and the team. We will miss working with you.

#VC & Technology#Web/Tech

Feature Friday: DuckDuckHack

One of my favorite features of the DuckDuckGo search engine (a USV portfolio company) is the instant answer. The instant answer is the box at the top that gives you what you were looking for. For Fred Wilson, it looks like this:

Instant answer

So Gabe, the founder of DDG, hacked up a way for users to contribute instant answers. He calls it DuckDuckHack. And he created a Twitter account where he publishes all the Instant Answer hacks. Yesterday "mstratman" created a hack that generates QR codes. Here's the QR code for avc.com.

QR code
And this hack tells you what the currency is in a country.

Malawi
If you use DDG, then you should absolutely follow the Twitter account and get tips on cool instant answer hacks. But more than anything, this shows how Gabe is thinking about making DDG better and I like that.

#Web/Tech

Duck Duck Go Passed 1mm Searches Per Day

I'm a bit late with this news about our portfolio company Duck Duck Go but I am super excited about it so I'm posting it anyway. I'll let a tweet tell the story:

 

 

One million searches per day is not chump change. AOL does somewhere around four or five times that every day. And if you look at this public chart of Duck Duck Go's growth, you'll see that they may pass AOL sometime this year.

Ddg traffic

Why is DDG growing so fast? Well first and foremost, their product is getting better and better. I have changed all my browsers to default to DDG and I am watching the service improve before my eyes. And the redesign that launched around year end is excellent. So if you haven't tried DDG recently, you should give it a try.

But it may also be that other search engines are doing things that some users don't approve of and those users are shopping around for a new search engine. If you are in that camp, join me at DDG and see what clean, private, impartial and fast search is like.

#VC & Technology#Web/Tech

Changing The Default Search Engine In Chrome

Yesterday I read a great post by Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, on how he got DuckDuckGo into Time's top websites of 2011. I just loved the way he talked about what he did and shared the strategy with everyone else. So I decided I'd make DuckDuckGo my default search engine for the next month or two and see if I miss Google.

But since I use Chrome and just type whatever I'm looking for right into the address bar, I needed to change the default search engine. Happily DuckDuckGo told me how to do it. You learn something new every day and I learned this yesterday:

1 – When in Chrome, put the cursor over the address bar, doesn't matter what address is in it, and right click. You'll see a few choices, select "edit search engines"

2 – Then scroll down under "other search engines" and find the one you want to switch to and hover over it. There will be a button that says "make default". Click that.

3 – you are done. start searching in Chrome with a new search engine.

I think it might be nice to go back to a search engine that doesn't do anything other than search. DuckDuckGo seems to be exactly that. So I'm giving it a shot at my search business.

#Web/Tech