DuckDuckGo’s Huge Growth Shows People Do Care About Privacy

DuckDuckGo had a big year in 2021. As it turns out, the search engine saw massive growth despite being in a battle against Google, a brand so entrenched in the search world that people refer to searching as “Googling.”

According to Bleeping Computer, DuckDuckGo saw an impressive search volume increase of 46.4%. The report says DuckDuckGo received 23.6 billion total search queries with a daily average of 79 million search queries by the end of December 2020. In 2021, the total number of search queries rose to 34.6 billion, and the daily searches jumped to 100 million per day.

This is a clear sign that at least some internet users are concerned about privacy, as they’re using a privacy-focused search engine. The rise of the DuckDuckGo mobile app could also be responsible for some growth.

While the growth is impressive, DuckDuckGo still has a long way to go before it catches Google. According to the report, Google has a whopping 87.33% of search engine traffic in the US compared to DuckDuckGo’s small 2.53%. However, DuckDuckGo is rapidly catching up to Yahoo, which has 3.3% of search traffic. Bing gets 6.43% of search traffic.

DuckDuckGo recently announced a desktop browser, which should further help its search market share, as users who download the company’s browser are far more likely to rely on the privacy-focused search engine.