DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, has reached a new milestone of
30 million direct searches a day, via
Search Engine Journal. It reached the record just over 10 years after the service was first launched. The growth comes in the wake of a series of privacy scandals, from
Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica breach to Google’s
ever-tracking location history, that have made people much more aware of how their data is farmed and exploited by big tech firms.
DuckDuckGo’s
estimated market share of
0.18 percent of global searches pales in comparison to established search giants like Google’s 77 percent, Baidu’s 14 percent, and Bing’s 5 percent. At least it’s ahead of the once-mighty AOL, which sits at a paltry 0.03 percent. DuckDuckGo’s achievements are laudable, but it seems convenience and features are still more important than privacy to most people.