Despite the steady gains in usage, the search engine's latest record serves as a reminder of just how daunting a task it is to put a dent in Google's dominance. Even at its latest peak, DuckDuckGo handles a fraction of a percent of the 3.5 billion searches processed by Google every day.

It's not just Google, either. According to NetMarketShare.com, DuckDuckGo still trails a number of other search engines in traffic, including Yahoo, Bing, and internet relic Ask.com—though it does have AOL beat. On a good day, DuckDuckGo claims about a fifth of a percent of the total search market. You can't cut a slice of the pie much thinner than that.

Image: Ian Clark / Flickr