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Privacy-focussed search engine, DuckDuckGo, touched a major milestone when the company crossed 100 million daily search queries on January 11 , the first time in its 12-year-old history.
Since then, it has crossed 100 million daily searches multiple times. DuckDuckGo is currently second after Google on mobile search engine market share in major markets such as the US, the UK and Australia, according web traffic analysis website, StatCounter.
It is also the most downloaded browser on Android, and second most on iOS, only behind Chrome. The company has seen 62% year-on-year growth in average daily searches between 2019-2020 and currently averages over 92 million daily search queries.
In a reply to The Hindu, DuckDuckGo spokesperson said they can’t point to one particular reason for the growth.
Also Read : Privacy and surveillance: On WhatsApp user policy change
“While we don't track our users, we do study user adoption through national surveys,” the spokesperson said.
The Pennsylvania-based company believes that the overall growth is driven by people who want more privacy online via word of mouth conversations. In addition to privacy reasons, DuckDuckGo said it sees an increases in searches and downloads around the new year when people try to clean up their digital tools and footprints.
The other reason is the recent WhatsApp privacy policy announcement . The company spokesperson noted that the policy change led to an increase in daily searches, similar to how it drove 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,” the spokesperson said.
According to DuckDuckGo, it has received great response since launching the mobile browser three years ago. While the company said it does not have knowledge about its users as much as other companies do since they don’t track users, it understands the importance of protecting their privacy.
In order to continue doing that, the company is planning to add new privacy protection products and features this year. However, DuckDuckGo did not mention specifics of the features and said it has no announce to make at this moment.
Published - January 25, 2021 05:37 pm IST
