DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, grows daily searches by 50% to 30 million

It’s almost common knowledge that most internet giants like Google and Facebook make a massive profit from selling your personal information. Thankfully, there are a few privacy-focused alternatives to most web services that don’t track your browsing use. One of these recently reported major growth over the past year. Search engine DuckDuckGo now gets 30 million searches a day, a 50% increase in a little less than a year.

Founded 10 years ago, DuckDuckGo is a search engine that doesn’t track user data. Rather, they track only the keywords that are used, not the people that used them. Using this data, DuckDuckGo then uses this data to sell advertising space based on keywords instead of user data. This model is the primary revenue driver for the search engine, and while it isn’t as lucrative as Google’s model of targeting specific users, it is better for the end consumers as they retain their privacy and anonymity.

DuckDuckGo hit 10 million searches a day about 3 years ago and hit 20 million a little less than a year ago. Some of this growth is surely due to an increased awareness of how other services (primarily Google) treat user data. Many users across the internet have expressed extreme discontent to being tracked, which has spurred other companies to offer privacy-focused services. DuckDuckGo isn’t the only Google-alternative that doesn’t track users, but based on these growth numbers, it may be one of the most popular.

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