Comments on: 179: TZ Interview – Gabriel Weinberg / Blowing Up DuckDuckGo

By: Jonathan Wheat

Jonathan Wheat — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:17:35 +0000

Great interview. It was nice to hear from someone on the east coast become such a success in the tech world. Especially the way he did it – with a family, a baby, skyping across country with VCs, single founder, and staying small.

Made me laugh, thinking what was going on in the mind of some big wig VC possibly hearing the baby in the bounce seat in the background during the call.

Great show.

-Jon

By: Jian

Jian — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 07:50:19 +0000

So duckduckgo is kind of like a meta search engine then. Similar to dogpile.com etc.

It takes a massive amount of resources (servers, etc) to scale a search engine, but the other side of it is that, most stuff on the web are just junk and not worthwhile to store anyway. I imagine that 90% of what Google stores in their giant data centers are just blackhat seo junk content.

So given this insight, I am building a search engine differently as an experiment from the small. Search is definitely one of the most interesting and useful application these days. Worthwhile for people to explore.

BTW, I saw the debacle of the volunia search engine hype. It seems to me that social data is just full of noise to be truly useful as data source.

By: Philippe Monnet

Philippe Monnet — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 13:21:14 +0000

The visual image of the Gabriel’s baby bouncing in the chair while skyping with VCs is going to be a classic!!! Thanks for sharing 🙂
This show demonstrates that there is no single path for startups to grow and be successful. Gabriel was talking very methodical steps and controlling the growth very conservatively but ultimately recognized he was “starving” DDG’s success and decided to take action, get funding to get into the next phase.
All around great story!

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 17:09:21 +0000

@Ian Drake – Thanks, I’m glad you liked the show. 😉 Gabriel is not only a smart guy and a great entrepreneur, but he’s just plain fun to talk to, so it’s always a blast to have him on the show.

By: Ian Drake

Ian Drake — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 16:18:25 +0000

I don’t get a chance to comment often because I listen on the road, but this was another great episode.

I’ve been using DDG for over a year now and the best part about it is that I can quickly jump into other search engines when I’m not seeing the results I’m looking for.

Keep up the good work.

By: Ben Reyes

Ben Reyes — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 13:15:23 +0000

This could have been the first time Gabriel mentioned the actual size of the round being $3M. I’ve just updated (pending approval) the DuckDuckGo CrunchBase page (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/duck-duck-go). Which I’ve referenced this page and an SEC filing http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1532263/000153226311000002/xslFormDX01/primary_doc.xml

By: Spark N Launch

Spark N Launch — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 08:43:14 +0000

Do you guys ever rest? Great episode. Gabriel’s approach to his business is so refreshing to hear – more relaxed than others.

Really like the duck duck go site, especially the bubble and don’t track landing pages.