BOSTON — New adult-specific search engine, BoodiGo.com has been nominated to receive the Innovative Web Product of the Year at the upcoming 2015 XBIZ Awards.
“We’re very proud of the work we’ve put into BoodiGo.com, and definitely feel its deserving of this recognition,” said Colin Rowntree, Wasteland owner and BoodiGo co-founder said. “We’re up against some tough competition, but we have a lot of points arguing in our favor, too.”
A collaboration between Rowntree, his wife and Sssh.com owner Angie Rowntree and the application development firm 0x7a69 Inc., BoodiGo made its official launch in late September. With a low-key media campaign focused on the benefits to user privacy and BoodiGo’s effort to offer search responses free of pirated content and other illicit materials, the search engine quickly drew more that 2.5 million curious web users, according to the operators.
Rowntree attributes the quick rise in BoodiGo traffic to overwhelmingly positive media coverage and something he calls “the Snowden Effect.” “For months, all we’d been hearing about is the government and private sector alike tracking web users and data-mining the living hell out of unsuspecting consumers,” Rowntree said. “We figured the time was right for a search engine which was explicit about not doing any of that.”
Following the launch of BoodiGo, Rowntree quickly established strategic partnerships with groups like ASACP and PornGuardian, enlisting their services to redirect search terms associated with child porn and to screen known piracy sites and URLs from the BoodiGo response pages.
“It’s a bit counterintuitive to some people, the idea of a porn-specific search engine proactively screening out specific porn sites,” Rowntree said. “But one of our biggest frustrations in recent years is seeing sites which offer pirated Wasteland and Sssh videos appearing above us in the major search engine’s response pages, and we knew others in the industry were experiencing the same thing, so we made a commitment to ourselves and to the industry: Pirate sites are not welcome on BoodiGo.”
Hosted by performer James Deen, the 2015 XBIZ Awards take place on Jan. 15 at the JW Marriot L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles.