On Valentine’s Day, DuckDuckGo started to record more than a million searches a day. I wasn’t really using any analytics because there wasn’t a point - we didn’t have any traffic yet.” I was just using the default server stuff. “Quite honestly, I had never really thought about this topic at all. People started asking basic questions like ‘How long are you keeping your logs?’ and that kind of stuff. “What happened was that I soft-launched the search engine to the community I was in, which was the Hacker News and Reddit community, and almost immediately I got questions around search privacy,” says Weinberg, who started DuckDuckGo in 2008. ( MORE: When Targeted Ads Attack: Engagement Rings, Teen Pregnancy and 55 Gallons of Lube)

Those are both radical moves in an industry where collecting personal information is big business. Gabriel Weinberg, however, started the search engine mostly as a way to focus his creative energy after selling another website he started, NamesDatabase, in 2006. If you aren’t familiar with the site, it’s a search engine with a decidedly spare aesthetic that doesn’t log IP addresses or record your search history. Follow commitment to user privacy was more or less an afterthought.

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