The DuckDuckGo privacy-focused search engine continues to grow rapidly, as the company reached 102 million daily search queries for the first time in January.
DuckDuckGo is a search engine that builds your search index using your DuckDuckBot crawler, indexing WikiPedia and through partners like Bing. The search engine does not use any data from Google.
What makes DuckDuckGo stand out is that they do not track their research to build a user profile or share any personal or identifying data with third-party companies, including ad networks.
“Every time you search on DuckDuckGo, you have a blank search history, as if you’ve never been there before,” explains DuckDuckGo on his privacy blog.
DuckDuckGo showed 62% growth in 2020
As people are increasingly concerned about how their data is being used online, DuckDuckGo has seen tremendous growth year on year.
In a statement to BleepingComputer, DuckDuckGo said it registered a 62% growth in the average daily searches in 2020. So far, in January 2021, the search engine receives an average of 90 million searches per day.
On January 11, 2021, DuckDuckGo received 102,251,307 daily search queries, a record for the search engine.
Source: DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo attributes its growth to users who seek more privacy when using the Internet. With increasing reports of data breaches, data about people being used for political purposes or their behavior tracked over the Internet, more and more people are switching to the search engine focused on privacy.
“While we don’t track our users, we study user adoption through national surveys. What we’ve learned from these surveys is that our overall growth is driven by people who want more privacy online through word of mouth,” said DuckDuckGo BleepingComputer .
The search engine also told BleepingComputer that high-profile privacy news, such as recent concerns about data sharing between WhatsApp and Facebook, have increased search engine traffic.
“The recent announcement of the Facebook / WhatsApp privacy policy appears to have had some impact on the increase in search similar to how it led people to private messaging alternatives like Signal. We’ve seen this happen before, when a high profile privacy issue is exposed, generally see an increase in usage, “explained DuckDuckGo.
According to StatCounter, this increased growth has led DuckDuckGo to become the second most used search engine on mobile devices in the US, UK, California and AUS markets.
While Google still commands 94% of the market in the United States, DuckDuckGo is now in second place with 2.25%, followed by Yahoo with 1.94%.