DuckDuckGo Hits New Milestone: 1 Million Searches

DuckDuckGo has good reason to quack. The small startup search engine announced via Twitter that it received more than 1 million searches for the first time on the eve of Valentine’s Day. More than a million searches were also conducted on Valentine’s Day.

A total of 1,067,006 searches were conducted on DuckDuckGo Monday, and 1,019,602 searches on Tuesday. This is significant growth compared to the number of direct queries DuckDuckGo were seeing per day last year.

Just a year ago those numbers were much lower – 175,914 on Feb. 13, 2011, and 211,669 on Feb. 14, 2011, according to its traffic page. That’s roughly a 507 percent year-over-year increase for Feb. 13 and 382 percent increase for Feb. 14. Congrats, Gabriel Weinberg and DuckDuckGo!

Quite impressive growth, but DuckDuckGo is nowhere near cracking the Big 5 search engines in the U.S. – Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and AOL. As a comparison, at last “official” count, a billion searches are conducted daily on Google.