Just over a week after passing a record 2 million searches in a single day, DuckDuckGo has announced a new milestone: the company processed 3,095,907 searches yesterday. DuckDuckGo made it clear that this stat does not include yesterday’s 18.9 million searches via its API and approximately half a million bot searches.
It’s no coincidence that DuckDuckGo’s stats are climbing as the PRISM and larger NSA surveillance controversy grows. The startup has received considerable attention as a Google alternative — remember, Google was cited as a main data source for PRISM. After facing severe criticism for its involvement, Google appealed to the US government in hopes of sharing more about the data requests it receives.
It took 1445 days to get 1M searches, 483 days to get 2M searches, and then just 8 days to pass 3M searches: https://t.co/u4HCuL2e1W
— DuckDuckGo (@duckduckgo) June 18, 2013
Following the PRISM controversy, we reached out to DuckDuckGo CEO and founder Gabriel Weinberg, who clarified that he believes DuckDuckGo could never be of use to PRISM:
…if the NSA were to come to us and ask for all our data, it would not be useful to them because our data is truly anonymous (as opposed to psudo-anonymous, which is never really anonymous).
As we’ve previously detailed, DuckDuckGo has also ramped up its media efforts lately. The service was recently profiled in the Washington Post and founder Gabriel Weinberg appeared on CNBC in April and Bloomberg last week.
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