DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, continued to maintain rapid growth in 2021-the average daily search times exceeded 100 million, nearly 47% higher than the same period last year. Compared with other search service providers, DuckDuckGo claims that it will not track users’ behavior on first-party and third-party websites, and the advertising content is only related to the context of the user’s search keywords, not user profiles based on interest.
For example, when you search for the TV keyword on DuckDuckGo, it will not use this part of the information to display relevant advertisements on other websites. In addition, DuckDuckGo built its own search index, using crawlers to crawl data from partner sites (such as Wikipedia and Bing), instead of relying on Google’s data.
In 2020, DuckDuckGo received a total of 23.6 billion search queries. By the end of December last year, it had achieved an average of 79 million search queries per day. In 2021, DuckDuckGo has received 34.6 billion search requests so far, reaching an average of 100 million searches per day-an an annual growth rate of 46.6%.
Even so, DuckDuckGo still only accounts for 2.53% of the US search market. For reference, Yahoo is 3.3%, Bing is 6.43%, and Google still dominates with 87.33%. Of course, as people become increasingly disgusted with the data collection and use policies of technology giants such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, we are expected to see more people turn to privacy-focused search services in the future.
It is worth mentioning that, in order to further help users protect their privacy, DuckDuckGo released an email forwarding service called “Email Protection” in 2021. The feature is the ability to filter mail tracking to effectively protect the user’s actual mail address. Secondly, DuckDuckGo launched the “Android App Tracking Protection” function, which can block third-party trackers from Google and Facebook,
The latest news is that DuckDuckGo announced that it will release a desktop version of the privacy browser-the browser is not based on the popular Chromium kernel, but do it yourself and build it from scratch.