The trajectory of the small but sprinting search engine from Paoli has received strategic boosts at key moments, and each new investment or development has helped refine DuckDuckGo in ways that have set it apart from the giant elephant in the room: Google.

What didn’t even begin as a quest to build a search engine has grown from a basement startup to a mere 20 employees scattered across the country, and its prime selling point has shifted from spam filtering and instant answers to the bulletproof privacy it offers to users’ searches.

And in light of Edward Snowden’s world-famous NSA leak, DuckDuckGo’s mission is all the more relevant to even the everyday Internet surfer.

“Unlike Facebook, where you choose what to post, with search you’re typing in medical and financial problems and all sorts of other things. You’re not thinking about the privacy implications of your search history,” founder Gabriel Weinberg said in a Fast Company Labs feature article.

Read much more about the environment behind the accelerating search engine, the growing talent cultivated from an eager community that has sprung up behind the underdog, and the next wave of improvements, including a visual redesign, in Fast Company Labs here.