I was looking at the DuckDuckGo traffic for the last few years. The stats are pretty impressive. A seven-fold increase in queries over the previous five years and this month’s number of queries is already more than last January. It looks like it’s going to be another year on year increase for queries.

It’s got me wondering about my usage of DuckDuckGo.

DuckDuckGo has been my search engine of choice for many years now, and as a result, I’m pretty familiar with a number of the bang methods that are available to help with your searches.

Now, I know DuckDuckGo is a privacy-first search engine. It’s why I use it in the first place. Saying that I’d still be interested to know how many searches I do over the year and how often I use the different bang methods. I don’t want the actual search terms tracked, just the number of times I search and how often I use each of the bang methods.

If DuckDuckGo did this, it would raise a few concerns about where they are going with tracking. This functionality might be best done in a browser extension so that it’s purely an opt-in feature.

Not everyone will agree with me about tracking your search usage, but I still think it would be quite interesting nonetheless.