Posts from Web search engine

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.

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:

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.

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

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.

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:

 

We received over 1,000,000 direct searches yesterday for the first time ever!duckduckgo.com/traffic.html

— duckduckgo (@duckduckgo) February 14, 2012

 

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.

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.

Related articles

• DuckDuckGo Hits New Milestone: 1 Million Searches (searchenginewatch.com)
• DuckDuckGo Has Its First Million-Search Day (searchengineland.com)
• Try DuckDuckGo: the friendly search engine (zaddymanlib.wordpress.com)