DuckDuckGo Celebrates 1 Billion Searches in 2013

Niche search engine DuckDuckGo announced it served more than 1 billion queries in 2013. Spikes in traffic occurred around the time the NSA surveillance scandal broke, catapulting traffic on the "anonymous search" engine around May of last year.

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Date published
January 13, 2014 Categories

Search engine DuckDuckGo is just over five years old, and has quite a bit to celebrate. In a recent announcement, the search engine proclaimed it served more than 1 billion searches in 2013.

Looking back on the year, the search engine appeared to experience highs that correlated heavily with current events, which DuckDuckGo annotates here.

See the annotation marked “I”? That’s when DuckDuckGo says revelations about government surveillance began surrounding the NSA PRISM surveillance scandal. From summer to fall of 2013, traffic on DuckDuckGo grew from just under 2 million searches on June 6 to more than 4 million on November 10, 2013.

Last year, its “anonymous search” angle gave people an outlet for search after the PRISM leaks caused widespread concern over privacy. And even though major search engines denied involvement in PRISM, many still questioned how mainstream engines stored and used data when Web browsing.

In September, Google made its move to 100 percent encrypted search.

But it’s not just encrypted search that DuckDuckGo says makes its search engine different. The search engine says it’s better because it:

To give DuckDuckGo a try, check it out here.

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