I think his point was not that you need to go yet farther to court the privacy niche but that you're going to have a very tough time doing so, no matter how har

I think his point was not that you need to go yet farther to court the privacy niche but that you're going to have a very tough time doing so, no matter how hard you try. Google makes billions of dollars a year off of their search, so people can have pretty good faith that they won't do anything to make people wary of searching with them. So you'll catch a small niche of crazies (but small in the scope of the Internet may still be pretty big) and maybe get yourself in some more people's minds as "that place to search if I ever need to run search queries that might get subpoenaed." The solution, though, is NOT to invest lots of time, energy, and money into make people think of you as better for privacy. You're currently the only search engine that logs so little, so you've got that niche (within people who know about you). Go court some other niches and work on making your overall product better.