NSA fears spark traffic surge on DuckDuckGo search engine

Media coverage of the US National Security Agency's Prism electronic surveillance program, as well as wider publicity for online privacy issues, is sending traffic soaring at search-engine DuckDuckGo.

The site, which promises not to send users' searches to other sites or store any personal information, generated just under 3.1m direct queries on Monday (17 June), compared to its daily average of 1.8m direct queries in the month of May.

The growth is revealed on DuckDuckGo's public traffic page, which shows a rapid increase in direct queries since the Guardian's first story on 9 June claiming the NSA had obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and other US technology companies.

So far in June, DuckDuckGo is averaging 2.1m direct queries a day, as well as 16.3m through its API and 443k through bots. The company celebrated the 3m milestone in a tweet outlining its growth over time:

It's an impressive spike, although DuckDuckGo remains a small player in the internet search industry. ComScore estimates that in the US alone, Google's search engine generated 13.4bn explicit core search queries in the month of May, followed by 3.5bn for Microsoft sites and 2.4bn for Yahoo sites.

DuckDuckGo has been mentioned in numerous Prism-related articles since 9 June as a privacy-protecting alternative to those larger rivals' search engines. The company has been reinforcing this message with its own public statements, too.

"By not storing any useful information, DuckDuckGo simply isn't useful to these surveillance programs," chief executive Gabriel Weinberg told Silicon Angle last week. "We literally do not store personally identifiable user data, so if the NSA were to get a hold of all our data, it would not be useful to them since it is all truly anonymous."

DuckDuckGo isn't going to knock the big search-engine guns off their perches in the immediate future, but its slogan: Google tracks you. We don't – as famously emblazoned on a San Francisco billboard ad – appears to be striking a chord with more internet users.