So much for people cooling down on the whole internet privacy issue. After steadily gaining momentum into the end of last year, DuckDuckGo, the encrypted pro-privacy search engine alternative, blasted off like an angry shuttle of private internet search queries in 2012, passing the one million queries-a-day milestone in the middle part of February.

Granted, that’s only .001% of the daily search queries that go through Google but still, that’s an enormous boost in traffic going through DuckDuckGo. This is likely correlative of the fact that general conversation about privacy picked up after Google announced it was changing its privacy policy on January 24, but prior to that day DuckDuckGo had been hovering between the 400K-600K neighborhood of direct searches per day. The afternoon after Google announced the policy change, a new record high of 848,468 searches were made on DuckDuckGo; skipping a little more than a month ahead on February 27th, that number had ballooned to 1,320,022 searches.

Since then, DuckDuckGo told the carpenters to take the roof off the building because their traffic has been skyrocketing: yesterday, March 28, the site had 1,518,581 direct queries.

In addition to internet users becoming more mindful of their own online privacy, the boom also corresponds with some significant funding the website received back in October 2011.

As the company continues to forage into the mainstream and more support coalesces around sites promoting user privacy, the company looks to be making some improvements to the site’s quality of service. In a post on Hacker News earlier today, DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg posted the following under the thread “DuckDuckGo is blowing up“:

Thank you all! (I’m the founder.)

In response to a lot of the comments here, please know that two major things we’re working on are better programming queries (https://duckduckgo.com/tech.html — one of my new favorites https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa) and speed.

For speed, just this week we upgraded our whole caching system, which should significantly speed up a lot of queries. I’d be interested to know if anyone has noticed any difference over the past day or so. This change should equalize a lot of the location differences, which is the main issue. In some parts of the world we were way slower.

The post goes on to mention that DuckDuckGo is becoming involved in open sourcing as well as bringing more hands on deck for help with system administration.

To infinity and beyond, DuckDuckGo. Infinity and beyond.

[Via 9to5Google.]