When BoodiGo.com co-founder Colin Rowntree first conceived of launching an adult entertainment-specific search engine that emphasizes user privacy, he certainly expected it to find an audience – just not quite such an enormous audience, perhaps.
“Within hours of making our first announcement, we realized we were going to have to devote additional servers to BoodiGo in order to support the amount of traffic and searches we were seeing,” Rowntree said. “The consumer response was just amazing and outpaced even our most enthusiastic projections.”
Spurred on largely by positive media coverage – BoodiGo hasn’t spent a dime on traffic or advertising to date – the new search engine took off quickly. BetaBeat.com termed it “a new search engine just for porn, for when Google just isn’t sexy enough.” BoodiGo’s proactive efforts to offer surf-safe and legitimate search results led Cosmo.com to note the search engine “let’s you find porn without giving you a computer virus.”
While it’s no secret that porn has long been a consistent draw for web users, the primary driving force behind consumer interest in BoodiGo is the privacy factor, with surfers in droves jumping on the opportunity to use a search engine that doesn’t track their every online move in furtherance of profile-building and ad-targeting. As Salon.com put it, BoodiGo “might be the best new way to find porn without selling users’ fantasies to advertisers.”
In the days immediately following its launch, BoodiGo received over 2.5 million unique visitors, a surprising percentage of which accessed and read the site’s privacy policy, in addition to trying out the search function.
“I’ve been running adult websites since 1994, and I’ve never seen anything like this sort of interest in a privacy policy,” Rowntree said. “I think it says a lot about what really appeals to people about BoodiGo; it’s not just a good way to find online porn, it’s a good way to find online porn without having to look over your digital shoulder, so to speak.”
For Rowntree, that appeal comes as no surprise, as it fits into a larger cultural concern about privacy, both online and offline.
“One of the things that inspired the creation of BoodiGo was an explosion of news stories that revealed just how frequently and intensely we are monitored as Internet users,” Rowntree said. “The NSA and other federal government surveillance gets the headlines, but if you think about it, private sector tracking of users is the thing that’s truly ubiquitous. I think there’s a new level of awareness among the public that Big Brother might not be the government; Big Brother just might be a bunch of suit-wearing VPs sitting in a boardroom.”
Boodigo is the very first adult-oriented search engine that takes the user directly to explicit 21+ sites without the clutter of mainstream search services, in a completely anonymous and secure online environment. Boodigo was developed over a one-year period by site developers and content creators in the adult entertainment industry that set out to create a superior search service without the security and privacy issues found on mainstream sites.
