After Making Millions In His 20s, This Guy Got Venture Funding For A Google-Killer

Google has an incredibly strong hold on the search market, owning nearly 70 percent of it worldwide.

But that's not stopping Gabriel Weinberg from going full-force ahead with his search engine DuckDuckGo, Neowin's Max Slater-Robins reports.

In 2006, while Weinberg was in his 20s, he sold social networking company The Names Database to Classmates.com for about $10 million.

With money to spare, Weinberg eventually launched search engine DuckDuckGo in 2008. It positions itself as a better search engine that respects your privacy. DuckDuckGo doesn't filter your results based on your search history because otherwise, users are left in a "bubble" of their own interests. It also doesn't track your clicks, unlike Google.

"Many users are beginning to care about their privacy and personal data which is why users will try DuckDuckGo," Weinberg says. "[...] Ultimately though, the reason we think we'll be different and that users will stick around is the superior search experience via instant answers and less spam/clutter."

What DuckDuckGo lacks is image search, as well as native maps search. But Weinberg tells Slater-Robins that he's working on integrating those features this year.

In the last three years, DuckDuckGo has grown from 1.18 million direct user searches per month to 50 million searches per month. (On average, that's 1.6 million searches per day.)

Weinberg has mostly bootstrapped DuckDuckGo, but has also received $3 million from Union Square Ventures, Scott Banister, Peter Hershberg, Joshua Stylman, Joshua Schachter, Kal Vepuri, and Jim Young.