100 million searches per day

DuckDuckGo celebrates a milestone by reaching 100 million searches in a single day.

DuckDuckGo’s public traffic data indicates that the record was reached last Monday, January 11th.

Including Monday’s milestone number, DuckDuckGo is on track to reach about 90 million average daily searches for the month of January.

For comparison, DuckDuckGo averaged around 52 million average daily searches in January 2020. This means that this month’s figures represent a 73% increase year over year.

To further put this record growth into perspective, here are the previous year-over-year increases in average daily searches:

• January 2019 to January 2020 – 52% increase
• January 2018 to January 2019 – 62% increase
• January 2017 to January 2018 – 61% increase
• January 2016 to January 2017 – 30% increase

DuckDuckGo’s growth is not limited to web search, as its mobile app is more popular than ever.

Last week, it reached a high of # 7 on the iOS App Store charts for all free apps and # 1 of all utility apps.

DuckDuckGo’s success on mobile propelled him to second place behind Google for participation in the mobile search market, usurping Bing and Yahoo.

Related: DuckDuckGo vs. Google

That’s right, DuckDuckGo is officially the # 2 mobile search engine in the USA. On the desktop, it is behind Bing and Yahoo in fourth position. However, there is less room for a search engine to grow on computers, as more searches occur on mobile devices.

Whichever way you choose, DuckDuckGo is experiencing a growth rate never seen in its 12-year history. All signs point to this being part of a bigger shift towards private platforms.

DuckDuckGo’s main selling point in relation to other search engines is its privacy features. Users can search without having their personal information collected and sold to advertisers.

Recent events have reinforced the adoption of privacy-based applications. As DuckDuckGo rises in the App Store ratings, so do encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Telegram.

At the time of writing, Signal and Telegram are # 1 and # 2 on the U.S. App Store, respectively.

As people become more aware of how companies use their data, it appears that they are making conscious decisions to choose different services.

Antitrust investigations at companies like Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google have brought their privacy policies to the forefront. As a result, people are realizing what they are hiring for big technology when they agree to their terms of service.

Alternative search engines, social media apps and messaging apps are all on the rise. Whether this growth is sustainable is something we will discover over time. It is possible that users will find greater satisfaction in the services they originally used.

As far as DuckDuckGo is concerned, its growth has been stable enough to suggest that it will remain so. As I demonstrated earlier, DuckDuckGo’s journey to 100 million searches per day took years to achieve. It is not something that happened overnight.

Now would be a great time for DuckDuckGo to invest in more features that make it a true 1: 1 alternative to other search engines. We’ll see if this growth in daily searches spurs some updates in the near future.

Sources: DuckDuckGo, Statcounter, SimilarWeb,