Privacy-focused Google Search rival DuckDuckGo reached 100 million search queries in a day for the first time in over a decade.
The increase in search queries on the platform is a sign people are seeking alternatives to Big Tech platforms such as Google and Microsoft’s Bing, the former being particularly notorious for collecting user data.
According to DuckDuckGo’s public traffic stats, it achieved a significant milestone on January 11 when it recorded 102,251,307 search queries. That was the first time it registered over 100 million search queries in 12 years.
DuckDuckGo achieved 50 million search queries a day for the first time in November 2019, meaning it took more than a year to double the figure. But the growth has been steady — it has been recording 2 billion search queries a month since August 2020.
Compared to Google, the figures might seem small. Google dominates the search engine market, with over 80 percent of the market share and about 5 billion search queries daily. However, DuckDuckGo’s increase in traffic signifies that people are seeking alternatives to Big Tech platforms, which do not value privacy.
The increase in traffic on the search engine can be attributed to the fact that it values privacy. It claims it does not collect or sell user data. The site has distanced itself from Google’s model of collecting and selling data to offer targeted ads. DuckDuckGo does not store users’ search histories.
It might take some time to prove a worthy competitor to Google Search but it is beginning to catch up with Microsoft’s Bing, the second largest search engine with about 6 percent of the market share.
