Preface: I have only little knowledge aboud DNS records. Feel free to correct or add any information.
Here is what 10 minutes on the internet got me:
- According to Wikipedia [0] DDG started 2008
- The whois record shows 1995 as creation date (I assume this is the first time someone registered it back then?)
- According to [1] the Domain changed owners 3 times (since 2002); These records indicate Google bought the domain latest in 2010
- According to [2] DuckDuckGo Traffic 2010 was between 40k-80k quries per day (~0.5 - 1 QPS)
Unfortunately, this doesn't allow (me) to draw a clear conclusion. (If duck.go were bought in 2005 or 2015, it would have been more clear...)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo
[1] http://whoisrequest.com/history/
[2] https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
