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 on Monday, January 11.

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

For comparison, DuckDuckGo averaged about 52 million daily searches on average in January 2020. That means this month’s numbers represent a 73% year-over-year increase.

To put this record growth into perspective, here are the year-over-year increases in daily average 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 isn’t limited to web search, as its mobile app is more popular than ever.

Last week it peaked at 7 in the iOS App Store charts for all free apps and 1 on all utility apps.

DuckDuckGo’s success on mobile has propelled it to second place behind Google in mobile search market share, usurping Bing and Yahoo.

Related: DuckDuckGo vs. Google

That’s right, DuckDuckGo is officially the second-largest mobile search engine in the United States. On the desktop, Bing and Yahoo fall behind on the # 4 position. However, there is less room for a search engine to thrive on the desktop as more searches occur on mobile devices.

Whichever way you choose to look at it, DuckDuckGo is enjoying an unmatched rate of growth in its 12-year history. All signs point to this being part of a wider shift to private platforms.

The main selling point of DuckDuckGo over other search engines is its privacy features. Users can perform searches without their personal information being collected and sold to advertisers.

Recent events have encouraged the adoption of privacy-based applications. As DuckDuckGo moves up the ranks of the App Store, so do encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Telegram.

As of this writing, Signal and Telegram are # 1 and # 2 on the US App Store, respectively.

As people become more aware of how businesses use their data, it seems like they are making conscious decisions to choose different services.

Antitrust investigations of companies like Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google have brought their privacy policies to the fore. As a result, people realize what they entrust to big tech when they agree to their terms of service.

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

As for DuckDuckGo, it has grown steadily enough to suggest it will continue to do so. As I demonstrated earlier, DuckDuckGo’s journey to 100 million searches per day has taken years. It was not something that happened overnight.

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

Sources: DuckDuckGo, Statcounter, SimilarWeb,