Fueled by Snowden and Apple, private search engine DuckDuckGo rapidly grows

The privacy-minded search engine DuckDuckGo announced that it has reached a milestone. The Google alternative now serves over 10 million searches per day. (By comparison, Google serves about 4.3 billion per day.) Back in May 2012, DuckDuckGo hit an all-time record of 1.5 million searches per day. At that time, its daily search traffic had grown by 227 percent in three months. In the three years since, DuckDuckGo has continued to grow as more Internet users have become increasingly privacy-conscious online. DuckDuckGo's traffic jumped noticeably after the Snowden revelations in June 2013, and it continued to rise after being included in the OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 versions of Safari nearly a year later. Mozilla also added it as an option to Firefox late in 2014.