DuckDuckGo Direct queries per day (28 day average)

They got a huge boost out of the whole NSA fallout, which they consequently used to great effect for marketing. Good for them! I still hate the name, though.

if anyone is curious, the first article in the guardian based on snowden's data was on 5 june, about where P is marked.

In case they can't handle scaling fast enough: www.startpage.com

This increase in traffic are not being seen in the unique visitor counts measured by Compete (https://siteanalytics.compete.com/duckduckgo.com/). It appears as if a loyal core of duckduckgo users are switching to it entirely. Alternatively, duckduckgo users are not tracked by Compete, which is entire possible since I believe Compete gets their data from browser extensions that don't respect privacy. Note, Compete data is old, and wouldn't reflect this surge.

Startpage.com is doing pretty well, too (and is not based in US). They've just reached 4 million searches per day:

https://startpage.com/eng/press/pr-four-million.html