Privacy-focused Search Engine DuckDuckGo Grew by 62% in 2020

The privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo continues to grow rapidly as the company reached 102M 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 makes DuckDuckGo stand out is that they do not track your searches to build a user profile or share any personal or identifying data with third-party companies, including ad networks.

“Each time you search on DuckDuckGo, you have a blank search history, as if you’ve never been there before,” DuckDuckGo explains in their privacy blog.

DuckDuckGo showed 62% growth in 2020

As people are increasingly becoming more concerned about how their data is being used online, DuckDuckGo has seen huge growth on a year-by-year basis.

Also Read: Key PDPA Amendments 2019/2020 You Should Know

In a statement to BleepingComputer, DuckDuckGo said that it recorded 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 11th, 2021, DuckDuckGo received 102,251,307 daily search queries, a record for the search engine.

DuckDuckGo attributes its growth to users who are seeking more privacy while using the Internet. With the increasing reports of data breaches, people’s data being used for political purposes, or their behavior tracked throughout the Internet, more and more people are switching to the privacy-centric search engine.

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

The search engine also told BleepingComputer that high-profile privacy news, such as the recent concerns regarding data sharing between WhatsApp and Facebook, lead to increased traffic for the search engine.

“The recent Facebook / WhatsApp privacy policy announcement seems to have had some impact increasing search similar to how it has driven people to private messaging alternatives like Signal. We’ve seen this happen before, when a high profile privacy issue is exposed, we generally see an increase in use,” DuckDuckGo explained.

According to StatCounter, this increased growth has led DuckDuckGo to become the second most used search engine on mobile devices in the US, UK, CA, and AUS markets.

Also Read: The 5 Benefits Of Outsourcing Data Protection Officer Service

While Google still commands a 94% market share in the US, DuckDuckGo is now in second place with 2.25%, followed by Yahoo at 1.94%.