Interesting... Not at all what I expected. I have a lot of respect for Duck Duck Go.
But it's interesting to learn that his first startup got very close to a lot of what would be considered now gray areas... Creating thousands of dummy pages to get traffic from Google... forcing people who sign up to give 5 email addresses to promote the service...
Let's put it this way: my impression from that interview is that Gabriel got really close but eventually stayed on the right side of the fence. Kind of a success story :-)
Thx. I'm actually very sensitive to ethical issues and was constantly evaluating them. When we got our first complaint (for lack of understanding what the site did) we actually took down the entire site for a while and looked everything over from a user's perspective from top to bottom. At that point, we added even more explanations and such. So I really do believe everything was crystal clear.
As for dummy pages, this was not business related. I had just put up random stuff for the fun of it to see what would happen. This wasn't explained in the interview (I think), but when we got going as a business we replaced those pages with our real database. So we were exposing our entire database, for free, without having to sign up at all.
Also, wrt to the email addresses. This wasn't in the interview either, but if you didn't enter the addresses, you'd get a skip link within 30 minutes to get into the site without having to do that. Also, our free unlock and upload address book features were never forced. People did those completely on their own, and as I mentioned in the interview, the upload address book had really no incentives along with it.
Comments
Interesting... Not at all what I expected. I have a lot of respect for Duck Duck Go.
But it's interesting to learn that his first startup got very close to a lot of what would be considered now gray areas... Creating thousands of dummy pages to get traffic from Google... forcing people who sign up to give 5 email addresses to promote the service...
Let's put it this way: my impression from that interview is that Gabriel got really close but eventually stayed on the right side of the fence. Kind of a success story :-)
Thx. I'm actually very sensitive to ethical issues and was constantly evaluating them. When we got our first complaint (for lack of understanding what the site did) we actually took down the entire site for a while and looked everything over from a user's perspective from top to bottom. At that point, we added even more explanations and such. So I really do believe everything was crystal clear.
As for dummy pages, this was not business related. I had just put up random stuff for the fun of it to see what would happen. This wasn't explained in the interview (I think), but when we got going as a business we replaced those pages with our real database. So we were exposing our entire database, for free, without having to sign up at all.
Also, wrt to the email addresses. This wasn't in the interview either, but if you didn't enter the addresses, you'd get a skip link within 30 minutes to get into the site without having to do that. Also, our free unlock and upload address book features were never forced. People did those completely on their own, and as I mentioned in the interview, the upload address book had really no incentives along with it.
I wouldn't consider them gray areas; more like clever hacks to discover a market without having to spend a lot of money.