Privacy-Focused Search Engine DuckDuckGo Grows 62% in 2020

Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo continues to grow rapidly as the company hit 102 million daily search queries for the first time in January.

DuckDuckGo is a search engine that builds its search index using its DuckDuckBot crawler, indexing WikiPedia and through partners like Bing. The search engine does not use any data from Google.

What sets DuckDuckGo apart is that it does not track your searches to create a user profile or share personal or identifying data with third-party companies, including ad networks.

“Every time you search DuckDuckGo, you have an empty search history, as if you had never been there before,” DuckDuckGo explains in his privacy blog.

DuckDuckGo posted 62% growth in 2020

As people become more concerned with how their data is used online, DuckDuckGo has seen tremendous growth year on year.

In a statement to BleepingComputer, DuckDuckGo said it saw a 62% growth in average daily searches in 2020. So far, in January 2021, the search engine receives an average of 90 million search queries per day.

On January 11, 2021, DuckDuckGo received 102,251,307 daily search requests, a search engine record.

DuckDuckGo attributes its growth to users who seek more privacy when using the Internet. With more and more reports of data breaches, people’s data being used for political purposes, or their behavior tracked on the internet, more and more people are turning to the privacy-driven search engine.

“While we don’t track our users, we do study user adoption through national surveys. What we learned from these surveys is that our overall growth is being driven by people who want more privacy online through word of mouth conversations, ”said DuckDuckGo BleepingComputer.

The search engine also told BleepingComputer that high-profile privacy information, such as recent concerns about data sharing between WhatsApp and Facebook, is driving increased traffic for the search engine.

“The recent Facebook / WhatsApp privacy policy announcement appears to have had an impact on the increase in search, similar to how it has led people to private messaging alternatives like Signal. We’ve seen that. happen before, when a high level privacy issue is exposed, we typically 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 Australian markets.

While Google still holds a 94% market share in the United States, DuckDuckGo now sits in second place with 2.25%, followed by Yahoo with 1.94%.