100 million daily requests for DuckDuckGo, a record for the increasingly popular privacy-friendly search engine. In the midst of the WhatsApp affair, the engine benefits above all from the concerns of Internet users with regard to their privacy.
The rapid growth of the DuckDuckGo search engine is confirmed. At the end of 2018, DuckDuckGo crossed the threshold of 30 million requests per day. At the start of 2021, a little over two years later, it is the symbolic threshold of 100 million searches that celebrates the service.
The performance was achieved on January 11, 2021. The following days, DuckDuckGo fell back below 100 million requests, but given the curve of the platform, it should quickly manage to stabilize above this mark.
Signal, Telegram, DuckDuckGo: privacy-friendly alternatives are booming
One can legitimately assume that the new privacy concerns that have emerged in recent days that have caused an exodus of WhatsApp users to competing messaging apps like Signal or Telegram (Signal has become the most downloaded app on the Play Store and the App Store) caused this renewed interest in DuckDuckGo.
As a reminder, the search engine promises not to exploit the personal data of users, unlike Google and company who use them for, in particular, advertising purposes.
This isn’t the first time DuckDuckGo has seen users turn to it after a controversy or privacy scandal. In 2012, Google changed its terms of use relating to personal data, offering DuckDuckGo a first boost. Ditto in 2013 after the revelations of Edward Snowden.
Then, the platform had taken advantage of an integration with Safari and Firefox as a possibility of default search engine among others to continue to make itself known. It was 2014, and DuckDuckGo really took off around that time. Finally, in early 2018, an update brought new personal information protection features. Very well received, it also contributed to the rise of the search engine until recent episodes.
Source: DuckDuckGo
