The privacy-focused search engine, DuckDuckGo, posted on Twitter that it has reached the 30 million queries per day on average milestone.
According to the company, it took seven years to reach 10 million search in one day. It took another 2 years to reach 20 million searches, and now, it has reached 30 million searches per day in less than a year.
The growth keeps on increasing as you can tell from the published traffic charts:
Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, told TechCrunch, “We’ve been growing by approximately 50% a year pretty consistently so at a macro level it isn’t too surprising, just the numbers are getting bigger!”
Weinberg added, “That said it has been even increased on top of that this year, especially in the past two months.”
The great thing about DuckDuckGo is that it offers a private alternative to Google, Bing and other similar search engines that collect behavioral data for ad targeting both on and off their services.
Because of the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, the GDPR and talk of privacy regulation in the US, it has raised public awareness about online data security concerns. This could end up spurring continued growth for privacy-centric initiatives.