[16bytes]

I strongly second not gating the service. Honestly, I laughed and closed the tab when I saw that I had to install an extension.

Furthermore, literally drawing a search-box and then having it not actually perform a search is a dark-pattern. If you have to trick people into doing an action, it's probably not the right thing to do.

If you have differentiating features, show people them! Optimize your flow on how you're different. If there aren't niches (e.g. some people use Bing for differentiated image search or travel) that people will come to you instead of going to Google for the same purpose, you won't see adoption. Google has such an advantage not because of their market position, but because of the huge amount of person-years they've spent developing their product.

If you're privacy first, that's great, but you are competing with DDG not Google. Privacy doesn't keep users coming back. Build a better product, people will come.

And that starts with letting your users search how they want to search, not how you want them to.

[richardsocher]

Thanks for your feedback. Makes sense. We dropped the requirement and now can more easily share some differentiated searches like: https://you.com/search?q=%23send%20sms%20in%20twilio&safe_se... or https://you.com/search?q=%23read%20csv%20file%20into%20panda... or https://you.com/search?q=best+headphones

We definitely have to work on our onboarding and showcasing the features better. We're still a super small team and this is just our MVP at launch.