The privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo continues to grow rapidly as the company reached 102 million daily queries for the first time in January.
DuckDuckGo is a search engine that builds its search index using its DuckDuckBot crawler, WikiPedia, and partners like Bing. The search engine does not use any data from Google.
What makes DuckDuckGo stand out is that they do not track your searches to set up a user profile or share personal or identifying data with third-party businesses, including ad networks.
“Every time you search on DuckDuckGo, you have an empty search history, as if you’ve never been there before,” DuckDuckGo explains in their privacy blog.
DuckDuckGo showed 62% growth in 2020
As people become increasingly concerned about how their data is used online, DuckDuckGo has experienced huge growth year after year.
In a statement to BleepingComputer, DuckDuckGo said it had recorded 62% growth in average daily searches in 2020. So far, in January 2021, the search engine will receive an average of 90 million searches per day.
On January 11, 2021, DuckDuckGo received 102,251,307 queries daily, a record for the search engine.
Source: DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo attributes the growth to users seeking more privacy while using the Internet. With the increasing reports of data breaches, people’s data being used for political purposes, or their behavior being tracked on the internet, more and more people are switching to the privacy search engine.
“Although we do not track our users, we study user adoption through national surveys. What we have learned from the surveys is that our overall growth is driven by people who want more privacy through oral conversations,” DuckDuckGo said. said. BleepingComputer.
The search engine also told BleepingComputer that high-profile privacy news, such as the recent concerns about data sharing between WhatsApp and Facebook, is leading to greater traffic for the search engine.
“The recent announcement of the privacy policy of Facebook / WhatsApp has apparently had an impact on the growing search for people who have driven for alternatives to private messaging like Signal. We have already seen this happen, when a high profile privacy issue is exposed, see we usually see an increase in usage, “DuckDuckGo explained.
According to StatCounter, this increased growth has made DuckDuckGo the second most used mobile search engine in the US, UK, CA and AUS markets.
While Google still holds a 94% share in the US, DuckDuckGo is now in second place with 2.25%, followed by Yahoo at 1.94%.