Search engine DuckDuckGo, which allows users to search the web anonymously – crowdsourcing its results from other sites such as Wikipedia – has achieved a new benchmark of three million direct searches in a single day.
The firm's Twitter feed suggests that use of the search engine is growing exponentially, stating that it took "1,445 days to get 1m searches, 483 days to get 2m searches". It passed the three million mark only eight days after the two million milestone.
It is conceivable that privacy concerns stemming from recent US government surveillance allegations may be driving DuckDuckGo's growing traffic, but as Google currently processes about one billion search requests a day, the fledgling search engine still has ground to make up.
DuckDuckGo was founded in 2008 by entrepreneur Gabriel Weinberg, after selling parent company of Classmates.com, The Names Database, to United Online for $10m. It seems to position itself in direct opposition to Google's alleged data privacy practices; a companion, DuckDuckGo-owned site named donttrack.us accused Google of using targeted advertising on sensitive subjects, as well as selling users' search information to other parties.
Two other alternate, anonymous search engines – StartPage.com and lxquick.com – have also just announced passing the three million mark.
In response to the accusations of supplying US government surveillance teams – secretly codenamed Prism – with user information, Google said: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a 'back door' for the government to access private user data."
The company has so far not supplied Computing with direct comment on the increased recent popularity of anonymised search engines such as DuckDuckGo.
