DuckDuckGo - Development on traffic (evolution from 2010 to 2016)

In June 2013, DuckDuckGo indicated that it had seen a significant traffic increase; according to the website's Twitter account, on Monday June 17, 2013, it had three million daily direct searches. On average during May 2013, it had 1.8 million daily direct searches. Some[61] relate this claim to the exposure of PRISM and to the fact that other programs operated by the National Security Agency (NSA) were leaked by Edward Snowden. Danny Sullivan wrote on Search Engine Land that despite the search engine's growth "it's not grown anywhere near the amount to reflect any substantial or even mildly notable switching by the searching public" for reasons due to privacy, and he concluded "No One Cares About "Private" Search".[62] In response, Caleb Garling of the San Francisco Chronicle argued: "I think this thesis suffers from a few key failures in logic" because a traffic increase had occurred and because there was a lack of widespread awareness of the existence of DuckDuckGo.[63] Later in September 2013, the search engine hit 4 million searches per day.[64][65][66] On March 23, 2015, DuckDuckGo retrieved more than 9 million searches for the first day in its history. That month also saw the search engine retrieve more than 250 million searches, another record for the company.

Reference 1: # searches (direct), # searches (API) and # searches (bot).

Reference 2: 2010-04-01, 2011-01-01, 2012-01-01, 2013-01-01, 2014-01-01, 2015-01-01 and 2016-01-01.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/!Bang