Duck Duck Go doubles traffic and helps the open source community

Since launching in 2009, Valley Forge search engine Duck Duck Go is gaining more traction in two areas chased by Founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg.
Traffic and charity.
According to internal statistics, the site’s queries have more than doubled, from around 75,000 to 100,000 searches per day throughout 2010 to a sudden 175,000 to 200,000 per day since January 3. One could point to the company’s aggressive marketing campaign, launched in January.
And Weinberg, on a blog post published last week, announced that the company was donating $1,500, equal to 10 percent of the companies income, to free and open source software. Donations were made to projects that helped shape the engine’s architecture, and to general projects that support web security and privacy.

Duck Duck Go’s user base decided where half of those proceeds would go, with much discussion in a community forum dedicated to the topic.
There are surely lessons in marketing to take from the startup, given the impressive increase in traffic, which seemingly happened overnight. Weinberg spent about $7,000 for advertising on a billboard along Route 101 near San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, reminding users that its privacy policy is more consumer-centric than some other search engine models.
The billboard received press from Wired, Business Insider, the Technology Review and this news site.
Aspirations of the company don’t seem far off from when we first spoke to Weinberg in May 2009, when the site was focused on marketing its spam-free search results. It’s now expanded that mission, but remains user-centric.
In late February, Google announced major changes to its search algorithm that lowered the value of content farm sites such as Demand Media, which writes content that matches commonly searched terms.