DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, hits 50 million daily searches

DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, celebrated a huge milestone this week. The search engine hit 50 million searches in one day on Monday, November 4th.

The Google-alternative search engine has seen a meteoric rise in use over the past few years. DuckDuckGo (DDG) hit 5 million daily queries shortly after introducing browser extensions for Safari and Firefox back in 2014. The search engine hit 10 million daily queries in June 0f 2016 and saw a rapid increase in use. In January 2018, DDG introduced a mobile app, which helped catapult it to 20 million average daily searches in June 2018, 30 million average daily searches in May 2019, and 50 million unique searches on November 4th.

DuckDuckGo prides itself on protecting user privacy and data. While Google, the monster of search engines, uses trackers to tailor its search results to individual users by following them long after they’ve left the search engine, DDG relies solely on keyword frequency. DDG does not track users and only looks at keywords to improve its search engine. The result is a less intrusive search experience that aims to show relevant sites based on search terms rather than browsing behavior.

Considering tools under Google’s umbrella are consistently called out for censoring or tailoring search results to particular ideologies and beliefs rather than using a fair and organic search method, DuckDuckGo has seen a large bump in popularity.

Do you use DuckDuckGo? Do you use the DuckDuckGo browser? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments.