The Guardian reported yesterday DuckDuckGo, the search engine that keeps user searches private, is now up to four million queries per day, with over a billion queries performed on the anonymous search engine during 2013.
Prior to the PRISM scandal that revealed the NSA was regularly tracking searches on major search engines, DuckDuckGo averaged approximately 1.5 million queries a day says the Guardian. “In the weeks and months following the Guardian’s publication of the NSA files, the number of [DuckDuckGo] users more than doubled,” writes Guardian reporter Alex Hern.
The Guardian claims DuckDuckGo’s activity has continued to increase, with a record 4,452,957 searches performed on January 7 of this year, DuckDuckGo’s “biggest” day so far.
DuckDuckGo sets itself apart from the more popular search engines like Google by making all searches performed on its site private, not tracking searches or collecting IP addresses. Even with its considerable jump in queries during the past year, DuckDuckGo still doesn’t come close to the one billion searches performed daily on Google.
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