The Internet search engine DuckDuckGo is known for its privacy. It does not profile its users and has more than 400 sources, including Wikipedia. Last August, he performed an average of 65.2 million searches per day. Some of these responses, called Instant Responses, appear at the top of the survey page and are designed to provide the user with an instant response that does not require the user to click on a link to find the information they are looking for. To be clear, user searches are not tracked and personal data is not shared with third party companies.
DuckDuckGo makes money by displaying ads from the Yahoo-Bing search alliance network. In 2018, DDG raised $ 25 million and growth is expected to reach 30% per year for the next five years, reaching $ 100 million in a single year. Last year, the number of searches conducted by DuckDuckGo reached almost 23.7 billion, an increase of 62% year on year. Exactly a week ago, DDG set a new one-day record for the company with 102,251,307 research requests on January 11th.
Kamyl Bazbaz, vice president of communications for DuckDuckGo, said USA TODAY, “People are looking for us because they want more privacy, and this is generally spreading word of mouth. People are looking for alternatives to the surveillance technology business model.” The search engine is available as an iOS application, a Android app and an extension Google Chrome. Almost 25 million people use the service.
Updated data for DuckDuckGo
Google and its related applications and platforms, such as YouTube, collect personal information from users that is used to generate online advertisements. This is exactly what DuckDuckGo is trying to avoid.