Image: DuckDuckGo
The privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo reached a major milestone in its 12-year history this week when it recorded its first day on Monday with more than 100 million user queries.
The achievement comes after a period of sustained growth that the company has been seeing for the past two years, and especially since August 2020, when the search engine regularly started seeing more than 2 billion searches per month.
DuckDuckGo’s popularity comes after the search engine expanded beyond its own website and currently offers mobile applications for Android and iOS, but also a dedicated Chrome extension.
More than 4 million users have installed these apps and extension, the company said in a tweet in September 2020.
But the search engine’s increasing popularity is due to the stated purpose of not collecting user data and providing the same search results to all users.
As emphasized last year, a lack of granular data sometimes makes it difficult for the business to even estimate the size of its own user base.
But this commitment to privacy has also helped the company gain a foothold among the privacy-conscious crowd. DuckDuckGo is selected as the default search engine in the Tor browser and is often the default search engine in the private browsing mode of several other browsers.
Historical week for privacy programs
The historic milestone of DuckDuckGo comes within a week when Signal and Telegram, two other privacy-oriented programs, also announced important growth periods.
Telegram announced on Monday that it would reach 500 million registered users, while Signal’s servers declined on Friday after “millions upon millions of new users” were seen in a sudden stream, which according to the company exceeded even its most optimistic forecasts.
We’ve been adding new servers and extra capacity every day this week at a record pace, but have surpassed even our most optimistic forecasts. Millions upon millions of new users are sending a message that privacy matters. We appreciate your patience.
– Sein (@signalapp) 15 January 2021
Both the increase in new users for Signal and Telegram is a direct result of a major PR snuff on Facebook after the company announced last week that it would block access to WhatsApp accounts unless users agree to a new privacy policy that Facebook access to more WhatsApp provides user data.
Yesterday, Friday, Facebook delayed the new privacy policy by three months, but by that time the damage had been done, and hundreds of millions of users were being reminded of their right to privacy, which was flowing to Signal and Telegram – but it would not ‘think that many users have been reminded to use DuckDuckGo instead of Google.
