DuckDuckGo Passes 3 Million Searches, Just 8 Days After Hitting 2 Million

Another week, another traffic record in the alternative search engine space.

DuckDuckGo (DDG) tweeted this morning about its latest milestone: more than three million direct searches in a single day.

As the company’s traffic page shows, it happened on Monday when DDG had 3,095,907 “direct searches.” Those are searches done by human visitors to duckduckgo.com. The count doesn’t include the millions of bot/API searches that happen each day.

What’s amazing, really, is the speed that DuckDuckGo hit three million searches. It was just last week that we reported on DDG passing two million daily searches for the first time. In a separate tweet this morning, DuckDuckGo showed how quick that is compared to the time needed to reach previous milestones.

It took 1,445 days to get 1M searches, 483 days to get 2M searches, and then just 8 days to pass 3M searches: https://t.co/u4HCuL2e1W

— DuckDuckGo (@duckduckgo) June 18, 2013

StartPage.com and Ixquick.com, two other alternate search engines that — like DuckDuckGo — pride themselves on keeping searcher activity private, also just announced that they passed three million daily searches.

It appears that privacy concerns from the NSA/PRISM issue are spurring at least a small percentage of searchers to seek out alternatives to Google, Bing and Yahoo. DuckDuckGo has taken advantage of that with appearances and/or mentions recently on Bloomberg TV, Fox TV, CNN, CBC Radio and smaller media outlets, as well.