Privacy-Conscious Google Alternative DuckDuckGo Triples Traffic in Three Months

It seems that all the Google privacy policy scare is having an effect and some, still a few, people are switching search engines, or at least doing more searches in other places and that doesn't mean Bing.

DuckDuckGo has been seeing quite an increase in traffic in the past couple of months and we know that for sure since the site publishes traffic numbers.

We've been following the accelerated growth for a while now, but it seems that it's now gotten some more attention from the wider community.

The site only had its first million query day in February, but hasn't seen a drop below the 1 million mark since. In fact, it's averaging 1.47 million queries per day in March.

Interestingly though, it seems that the growth started in January, continued in February, the last two weeks in particular, but then leveled off.

The fact that Google switched to the new privacy policy on March 1st may or may not be a coincidence. But DuckDuckGo was seeing accelerated growth before Google made the announcement.

To put things in perspective, DuckDuckGo is still far smaller than even the small search engines. The site has over 40 million queries for March, but AOL saw 266 million queries in February in the US alone, as counted by comScore. Google had 11.67 billion in the US.

Still, DuckDuckGo is not only growing, but it's improving as well. The site's founder just announced that a recent update to the cache system should speed things along, especially in some parts of the world.

However, its main draw remains its privacy policy which simply states that the site doesn't keep or use any personal information. Note though, that the search results come from a variety of sources, its own crawler, but also Bing, Wolfram Alpha and so on.