Image: DuckDuckGo
The DuckDuckGo privacy-focused search engine reached an important milestone in its 12-year history this week when it registered its first day on Monday with more than 100 million user search queries.
The achievement comes after a period of sustained growth that the company has seen in the past two years, especially since August 2020, when the search engine started receiving more than 2 billion search queries per month on a regular basis.
DuckDuckGo’s popularity comes after the search engine has expanded beyond its own website and now offers mobile apps for Android and iOS, but also a dedicated Chrome extension.
More than 4 million users installed these apps and extensions, the company said in a tweet in September 2020.
But the search engine’s increasing popularity is also due to its stated goal of not collecting user data and providing the same search results to all users.
As highlighted last year, this lack of granular data sometimes makes it difficult for the company to even estimate the size of its own user base.
But this dedication to privacy also helped the company gain followers among the privacy-conscious crowd. DuckDuckGo was selected as the default search engine in the Tor browser and is often the default search engine in the private browsing modes of several other browsers.
Historical week for privacy apps
The milestone of DuckDuckGo comes in a week, when Signal and Telegram, two other privacy-centric apps, also announced major periods of growth.
Telegram announced on Monday that it reached 500 million registered users, while Signal’s servers went down on Friday after seeing “millions and millions of new users” in a sudden flow that the company said has exceeded even its projections. more optimistic.
We added new servers and extra capacity at a record pace every day this week without stopping, but today we have surpassed even our most optimistic projections. Millions and millions of new users are sending a message that privacy is important. We appreciate your patience.
– Sign (@signalapp) January 15, 2021
Both new user spikes for Signal and Telegram are a direct result of a huge public relations mess on Facebook, after the company announced last week that it would be blocking access to WhatsApp accounts, unless users agreed to a new one. privacy policy that would grant Facebook access to more WhatsApp user data.
Yesterday, on Friday, Facebook delayed the new privacy policy by three months, but by now, the damage was done and hundreds of millions of users were reminded of their right to privacy, migrating to Signal and Telegram – but It wouldn’t be too much to think that many users have been reminded to use DuckDuckGo instead of Google.
