Ms. Dewey's spike

First of all, go look at this site:

http://www.msdewey.com/

Then go took at its traffic on Alexa:

Alexa reach

All this traffic for a search engine. A completely normal search engine. The thing that is unique is the User Interface. It appears that pure novelty is driving the traffic.

Now, if they had something really amazing for people to see once they arrived, this would be a win. What it means to you is that if you have something amazing, one way to get a burst of attention might be to attach a really novel user interface to it.