Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo reached a major milestone in its 12-year-old history this week when it recorded on Monday its first-ever day with more than 100 million user search queries.
The achievement comes after a period of sustained growth the company has been seeing for the past two years, and especially since August 2020, when the search engine began seeing more than 2 billion search queries a month on a regular basis.
DuckDuckGo’s popularity comes after the search engine has expanded beyond its own site and now currently offers mobile apps for Android and iOS, but also a dedicated Chrome extension.
More than 4 million users installed these apps and extension, the company said in a tweet in September 2020.
But the search engine’s rising popularity is also due to its stated goal of not collecting user data and providing the same search results to all users.
As it highlighted last year, this lack of granular data sometimes makes it hard for the company to even estimate the size of its own userbase.
But this dedication to privacy has also helped the company gain a following among the privacy-conscious crowd. DuckDuckGo has been selected as the default search engine in the Tor Browser and is often the default search engine in the private browsing modes of several other browsers.
Signal is blowing all records, and DuckDuckGo just passed 100,000,000 searches in a day. Privacy is cool 😎 👏 https://t.co/o3Oa9Pxe3m
— DHH (@dhh) January 16, 2021
