According to a report by Bleeping Computer, DuckDuckGo, a search engine centered around privacy, experienced significant growth in 2021.
Lucas Nolan of Breitbart News reported that the company is now averaging over 100 million daily search queries and has grown by 46% in 2021.
DuckDuckGo positions itself as a private alternative to search engines like Google.
It claims that it does not track users’ search history or their activity on other websites.
Additionally, DuckDuckGo does not create user profiles with information obtained via tracking to display targeted ads. Instead, as Nolan observed, “it displays contextual ads based on the searched keywords.”
Nolan added that “while Google may display ads for the latest cell phone to a user because a few days previously it tracked them scrolling through new mobile devices on eBay, DuckDuckGo will only serve ads for a new cell phone if the user searches for a term like ‘best cell phone to buy 2021.’”
In addition, DuckDuckGo uses its DuckDuckbot to crawl websites and obtain data from partners such as Wikipedia and Bing to display information. However, the bot does not acquire any information from Google.
Google still dominates internet searches. However, DuckDuckGo has experienced significant year-over-year growth, receiving 23.6 billion total search queries in 2020 and reaching a daily average of 29 million search queries by the end of the year.
In 2021 alone, DuckDuckGo had 34.6 billion total search queries and received an average of 100 million search queries per day. These numbers mark a 46.4% growth year-over-year.
The company recently released an email forwarding service called “Email Protection” that takes down trackers from emails and safeguards users’ real email addresses.
Furthermore, DuckDuckGo rolled out “App Tracking Protection” for Androids, which blocks third-party trackers from Google and Facebook in other apps. On top of that, the company announced that it will also be introducing a DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser for desktop users.
In a recent blog post, the browser lays out what its app entails:
“No complicated settings, no misleading warnings, no “levels” of privacy protection – just robust privacy protection that works by default, across search, browsing, email, and more… It’s not a “privacy browser”; it’s an everyday browsing app that respects your privacy because there’s never a bad time to stop companies from spying on your search and browsing history.”