Andy Meek talked to Gabriel Weinberg, founder of the privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo: “Not only is it now a built-in search engine option in browsers like Safari and Firefox, but the company says the trove of news stories about data breaches and revelations of government snooping have helped keep the search engine’s numbers climbing up and to the right. And the recent passing of 10 million daily searches provided an opportunity for Weinberg to take some time to talk with BGR about everything from his website’s trajectory to other companies’ products he approves of, as well as the growth of DuckDuckGo’s “instant answers” product and how he thinks we all ought to think about privacy. Weinberg has a few stats at the ready to underscore what the company is doing, and why: for starters, he points to a recent Pew report which found that 40 percent of Americans “think that their search engine provider shouldn’t retain information about their activity.” That, coupled with the fact that DuckDuckGo says it’s grown 600 percent since word of the extent of NSA’s surveillance efforts became public two years ago, would appear to give Weinberg & Co. a big mandate. The trick, of course, is that his product has to be as good as something like Google’s to make you want to make the switch – and it has to be that good without resorting to a reliance on data collected via tracking and similar measures.”