DuckDuckGo's early days to get traction

• DuckDuckGo had rather uneventful launch: posted it to Hacker News and received some response that led the founder Gabriel Weinberg to investigate search privacy and eventually become "the serach engine that doesn't track you." But it didn't bring traction;
• The initial traction came from SEO, targeting a keyword "new search engine". The trick was to build a karma widget that would display links to your social media profiles and how many followers you had on each service. People embed it on their sites and at the bottom there would be a link back to DuckDuckGo that said "new search engine." This channel strategy brought them a lot of links. Got number one for the keyword;

Ref:

• Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth