DuckDuckGrow: Privacy search soars 600% after Snowden dumps

Privacy-first search aggregator DuckDuckDuckGo has grown a whopping 600 percent since NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden began revealing the extent of the US spying apparatus.

The search engine uses sites including Wikipedia, Yandex, Yahoo!, Bing and Yummly and offers users bare-bones search results without the personalisation and tracking wizardry which powers Google.

Chief executive officer Gabriel Weinberg told CNBC it crunches some three billion searches a year.