LOS ANGELES – Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve seen the massive buzz generated by Boodigo, a search engine designed expressly for adult content. Boodigo is meant to give adult surfers peace of mind, among other things.
“Search for what you’re really looking for, anonymously,” says the single line of type on Boodigo’s otherwise plain home page. And that’s exactly the service Boodigo provides, according to Colin Rowntree.
Rowntree knows whereof he speaks. He founded Wasteland.com, the oldest BDSM community on the web. His wife, Angie, founded Sssh.com, one of the originators of porn for women and couples.
“Boodigo is designed to return accurate adult entertainment search results for our customers in a secure, private and anonymous environment,” he told said YNOT.com. “Boodigo does not use cookies or other user-tracking technologies to gather information about our users.”
YNOT: Why no cookies?
Colin Rowntree: We aren’t interested in building a “profile” on our users. Our core mission is simply to help you find what you’re looking for in a way that’s as efficient, effective and enjoyable as possible. In other words, using Boodigo means finding what you’re looking for without having to worry about what someone else might be finding out about you.
Boodigo also proactively eliminates sites from its responses that are known security threats, distributors of malware or perpetrators of fraud, and works with rights-holders to ensure unlicensed and illegal copies of their creative works are not found in our search results. This helps ensure that when you download content and materials you find through Boodigo, you’re downloading only what you intended to, free of viruses or spyware and free of intellectual property concerns.
How does Boodigo work? What makes it different from other adult search engines?
Boodigo provides safe, anonymous and reliable search results for any kind of adult entertainment sites. Rather than just video hosting listings, Boodigo provides results for traditional membership sites, porn star sites and blogs, adult industry news sites, sex toy stores and even a special function that allows tumblr fans to get adult listings from inside tumblr, even though tumblr has banned internal searches for adult keywords and phrases.
How is Boodigo different from mainstream giant Google?
What differentiates Boodigo from Google is that the core focus of search results is actual legal adult sites. We exclude piracy sites as well as non-adult listings for adult content searches on such publications as Ladies Home Journal and Redbook. Many mainstream magazines offer bedroom tips, and Google lumps those in with searches for adult products and services.
Boodigo has committed not to use cookies or other user-tracking technologies to gather information about users, as well. Boodigo was developed to provide surfers with an anonymous and secure search platform that does not set cookies or user-tracking in order to mine data about users. All sessions are encrypted.
Surfers come, search, find what they are looking for and leave without having traces of what they were doing at an adult search site on their home computer or other shared device. As the old joke goes, a woman says to her husband “Honey, I went on Google today and started searching for Amazon new products, but your auto-fill popped up ‘Amazing Hardcore Cuckolding Movies.’ Is there something you’d like to tell me?”
Where did you get the idea for Boodigo?
About two years ago, it became obvious that mainstream search engines were more and more pushing adult entertainment out of their listings in favor of safe-for-work links to such sites as Wikipedia, women’s magazines and mainstream SFW news outlets and blogs. As this continued to worsen, consumers were unable to be able to find relevant adult entertainment sites. It also impacted the adult industry, as demonstrated by a sharp decline in surfer traffic.
Add to that Google’s termination of AdWords for adult sites—even for paid listings of legitimate, safe and legal content—and it became obvious that something needed to be done.
What is Boodigo’s revenue model?
In a few weeks, we will be going live with our BoodiAds program, in which advertisers can bid on keywords in search results.
Are there opportunities for adult sites to affiliate with you?
Of course! At a very basic level, they may submit their galleries and such to the organic listings. And when BoodiAds is live, they are also welcome to be a part of the keyword bidding process.
What sort of traffic have you had so far? What patterns, if any, are you seeing?
Much to our amazement, we saw more than one million unique visitors in the first 28 hours after launch, mostly due to an enormous amount of mainstream press coverage of the launch.
As for patterns, it is most popular in North America, with Europe and Brazil coming in as close seconds.
As you mentioned, you have received a lot of mainstream media coverage. How has the press treated you? Has media coverage affected your site traffic?
Mainstream coverage has been excellent, and I’ve been very pleased with the highly positive treatment Boodigo has received everywhere from Gizmodo to Cosmopolitan. It seems Boodigo has struck a nice chord with a lot of people.
What are your future plans?
Beyond the BoodiAds program, we have several interesting new features on the way. And on the horizon is encrypted and secure instant text messaging which, obviously, we will name “BoodiCall!”
