The well-known search engine DuckDuckGo , which emphasizes the privacy of its users, continues to grow at a very fast pace, with the company averaging over 100 million daily search queries. According to statistics, the DuckDuckGo search engine grew by almost 47% in 2021.
Unlike other search engines, DuckDuckGo says it doesn't track users' searches or general online activity. Instead of creating user profiles that are used to serve interest-based ads, DuckDuckGo search pages display contextual ads based on the keywords used during searches.
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This means that if you search DuckDuckGo for a TV, that search query will not be used to display ads for TVs on any other site you visit.
Additionally, to create the search index, the search engine uses the DuckDuckBot spider to crawl sites and obtain data from partners, such as Wikipedia and Bing. It does not use data from Google.
DuckDuckGo shows continued and rapid growth
Google remains the dominant search platform, but DuckDuckGo has seen impressive growth in recent years.
In 2020, DuckDuckGo received 23.6 billion search queries and achieved a daily average of 79 million search queries by the end of December.
In 2021, it received 34.6 billion search queries (so far) and currently averages 100 million search queries per day, showing a growth of 46.4%.
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DuckDuckGo's growth is significant. However, it still only holds 2.53% of the total market share, with Yahoo holding 3.3%, Bing 6.43%, and Google holding 87.33% of search engine traffic in the US.
On the other hand, more and more people are starting to express concerns about how their data is being used by big companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. This is likely why DuckDuckGo is growing so rapidly. It's very likely that we'll see more people switching to search engines that focus more on privacy.
To further help users protect their privacy, DuckDuckGo also launched an email service in 2021 called “Email Protection” that removes email trackers while also allowing users to protect their real email address.
An interesting addition is “App Tracking Protection for Android”, which blocks third-party trackers from Google and Facebook (which are found in apps).
Additionally, last week, the company announced that it would release a desktop browser that would offer strong privacy protection.
Learn more: DuckDuckGo is preparing a desktop web browser with an emphasis on privacy! (video)
For those who want to regain control of their data and protect their privacy more, DuckDuckGo is a great choice!
Source: Bleeping Computer
