Ducking Google in search engines

PAOLI, Pa. — 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. An eye doctor is on the first floor. On the second floor is a search engine.

The proprietor of the search engine is Gabriel Weinberg, who is 33. 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.

“She was like, ‘What are you doing?’ ” Weinberg said. “She thought the idea was crazy.”

Her theory was hard to dispute. A start-up taking on Google in search is much like a raft taking on a cruise ship as a vacation option. But Weinberg is not delusional. With money lining his pockets from selling a start-up 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.

But what if that’s not really Weinberg’s goal?

He’s no Zuckerberg

Weinberg was born in the District but grew up near Atlanta in a tight-knit family. His father is a physician and infectious-disease specialist. His mother makes clothes and art, and Weinberg’s first job as a hacker — a child hacker — was building his mom a program to process orders online. He was not a complete dork. In middle and high school, he played soccer and tennis. He was, like most teens, a bit aloof. He spent a lot of time messing around with computers, and he excelled in his science classes, particularly physics. He studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but didn’t want to pursue it in graduate school. As happens with college kids, one thing led to another, and eventually he wound up programming.

He started his first company at MIT: a portal for teachers to put lesson plans online. He was too early. He failed. 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. It was called NamesDatabase. (“I’ve never been that good with names,” Weinberg says.) NamesDatabase did not fail. In 2006, he sold it to Classmates.com for $10 million.

Weinberg was a millionaire in his 20s. He had recently married. This gave him and his bride options. One was: Where did they want to live? They did not want to live in a big city. They wanted to have children and send them to a diverse school system. They wanted to be sort of near the country. They settled near Paoli, about 30 miles from Philadelphia and within walking distance of Valley Forge National Park. They have two kids, ages 3¹/₂ and 18 months, and next to his desk, covered with monitors, there is an area with toys so they can play while he codes.

He has been in Silicon Valley just one day in the past 12 years. He never appears at big tech conferences.