DuckDuckGo search engine takes on Google Washington Post Copyright 2012 Washington Post. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Published 11:44 a.m., Saturday, November 17, 2012 Not far from Valley Forge, around the corner from Bravo Pizza, up the road from Paoli Auto Body, there is an odd-looking office building that resembles a stone castle. A few years ago, when Weinberg told his wife about his new business idea - pitting him against more established outfits such as Google and Bing - he admits that she briefly thought he was nuts. With money lining his pockets from selling a startup for $10 million, Weinberg bet there was a place in the market for a product capitalizing on users' emerging annoyances with Google - its search results gamed by marketers; its pages cluttered with ads; every query tracked, logged and personalized to the point of creepiness. Because what's good for Google business is bad for Google users. In many ways, DuckDuckGo is an homage to the original Google - a pure search engine - and its use is soaring, with searches up from 10 million a month in October 2011 to 45 million last month. Scrutiny on GoogleThe attention to DuckDuckGo comes as U.S. and European Union officials are stepping up scrutiny into Google's search practices, which have been criticized for unfairly elbowing out competitors' content and results in favor of its own. "The reality in the United States is that we still really only have two search engines - Google and Bing," said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land. While living in Boston, he started another company after graduating - a database where users could submit their e-mail addresses and other people could pay to get in touch with them. Searching for "irritable bowel syndrome" on Google produces three ads as the top three links. Why? Because his business model would eventually call for serving up just one or two easy-to-miss ads based on the search query, which would generate enough revenue, he thought, to build a nice little business that one day might grab 1 percent of the search market - about five times what he's got now. A recent Pew Research survey found that 65 percent of Internet users see tracking as a "bad thing," and 73 percent thought it is an invasion of privacy. Clicking on the "about" link on the site's home page brings users to a link that says, "We don't track you," and that brings users to a page that features pictures from Google searches.