DuckDuckGo Passes 2 Million Daily Searches

DuckDuckGo, the upstart search engine that hangs it hat on protecting its users’ privacy, hit a new milestone on Monday: its first day with two million direct searches.

According to the company’s traffic page, DuckDuckGo saw 2,211,203 direct searches on Monday — up about 400,000 over Sunday’s searches. The phrase “direct searches” refers to humans that conduct searches on duckduckgo.com. It doesn’t include bot/API searches, which — in DuckDuckGo’s case — is averaging another 16+ million searches per day this month.

The letters on the chart below are annotations that help explain the ups and downs shown on the chart. In this case, the “P” refers to DuckDuckGo founder and CEO, Gabriel Weinberg, making an appearance Monday on Bloomberg TV in a segment that’s titled (online), “The Search Engine that Vows Not to Track You.”

Yesterday’s TV appearance — and DuckDuckGo’s traffic spike — was no doubt inspired by all of the coverage and awareness of the PRISM scandal that has brought into question what Google, Microsoft (Bing), Yahoo and others are allowing in terms of government access to user data.

DuckDuckGo reached a million daily searches in February 2012 thanks to interest that was generated by Data Privacy Day. Prior to that, it first arrived on many people’s radar when it launched DontTrack.us, a website that details how Google tracks searchers and how DuckDuckGo doesn’t.

Two million searches is a sign of DuckDuckGo’s continued growth, but it’s still a tiny fraction of the billion+ daily searches that Google says it gets worldwide.