In days where the traditional search engines integrating features that upsets many around or try rebranding themselves without really improving anything, maybe it is the time to look for some alternatives… Apparently, this is what just might going on recently after search engines like DuckDuckGo and Blekko are getting stronger.
While Google and Bing are so focused on the market share war between each other, they didn’t noticed that other search engines are lurking, just looking for small opportunities to progress more and more until… Alright, let’s not get carry away here, alternative search engines still have a long road (very long) until they could really compete with the leading search engines. However, they do demonstrate significant improvement.
DuckDuckGo: Daily Search Queries More Than Tripled In a Year
DuckDuckGo, that offers a complete private search browsing experience, has revealed couple of days ago in a Tweet that it had broke (again) its traffic record. Actually, the company didn’t had to disclose anything and we can track DuckDuckGo’s statistics ourselves because its stats are completely transparent and open for all at duckduckgo.com/traffic.html (what a great approach)!
According to the stats, so far in January (until the 24th), DuckDuckGo had and average of 564,493 search queries each day. This is an incredible growth of 331% (more than tripled) since the beginning of 2011! Although it is still just 0.14% out of Google’s average daily queries and its just 0.61% of Bing’s average daily queries, it is still a very impressive jump in a matter of one year period.
Blekko: 1,858% More Visitors In a Year
The alternative search engine that provides “spam-free” results, Blekko, has benefited from an even much greater and much more impressive traffic rise. According to data from Quantcast, Blekko had nearly 1 million unique U.S. visitors (994,784 to be accurate) in December 2011, which represent an amazing jump of 1858% (yes, more than 18 times as much) in a year!
It is worth mentioning that Blekko made a significant algorithmic upgrade in December 2011 that designated to reduce even more the spam results and the traffic data i present here still not reflecting this upgrade that may allure more visitors to this alternative search engine.
Alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo and Blekko are still far from threatening the hegemony of the general consensus search engines. However, their tremendous rise is indicating that at least small portion of searchers are shifting towards them, a trend that may increase in the upcoming year and worth following.