Do SEOs need to pay attention to DuckDuckGo’s explosive growth?

Chart of the Day: DuckDuckGo searches increase tenfold in five years

For those of us busily involved in the thankless task of getting algorithms to like our content and display it in the SERPs, how we attempt to optimize our content to appear high on results pages depends in large part on which search engines our audience are using. For most of us, this will mean optimizing for Google, which handles the lion's share of search queries in the majority of countries. Some SEOs may also optimise for Bing/Yahoo (they are both powered by Bing's algorithm), AOL if they are American or Baidu if they're in China.

But there is a new player on the block, which although still tiny in comparison to Google, is increasingly eking out an ever larger share of the search market. With over 14 million searches a month and growing rapidly, DuckDuckGo could soon become more than just a bit player in the search market. If it grows as rapidly in the coming 5 years as it has in the past 5, then it will handle over 150 million searches per day, more than the 122 million searches Bing+Yahoo currently handles per day. So clearly DuckDuckGo has a long way to go before it is even close to rivalling Google, it could be one to watch if you are already bothering to optimise for smaller search engines such as Bing, AOL etc.

• Data Source: NextPowerUp.com
• Recommended Toolkit: Search Engine Optimization toolkit.