When talking about search engines, most people only think of Google. Very few people seem to realize there are other popular search engines out there, even though they usually own a smaller market share. DuckDuckGo recently revealed that they surpassed the milestone of 14 million searches in a single day. As of December 2016, the platform has been gaining a lot of popularity.
Things Are Looking Good For DuckDuckGo
Competing with search engine giants such as Google and Bing is not an easy feat for any company. Smaller search engines, such as Wolfram Alpha and DuckDuckGo, have been somewhat struggling to gain market traction. That being said, things have been improving for DuckDuckGo, as December 2016 has been one of their busiest months in history.
Earlier this week, the company revealed how they served over 10 billion searches since launch. Interestingly enough, over 4 billion of those searches occurred in December of 2016. Considering Google and Bing have not had major issues ever since that time, this news has come as quite a surprise. Then again, DuckDuckGo positions itself as the only search engine that does not track its users.
Other good news for DuckDuckGo come in the form of their increased number of daily search queries. About a year ago, the platform served between eight and nine million searches per day. That number surpassed 14 million on January 9th of this year, which is quite a spectacular growth. It appears a lot of internet users want more privacy and transparency when it comes to search results. With all searches being conducted in an anonymous manner, there are no data records about user behavior either.
DuckDuckGo is quite pleased with this development, even though the company is growing a lot faster than even the owners have predicted. With more people actively looking to reduce their digital footprint, it is not unlikely DuckDuckGo will continue to see accelerated growth moving forward. Consumers feel a search engine provider should not retain information regarding their activity, yet that is exactly what Google and Bing are doing.
DuckDuckGo has been making headlines for other positive reasons as well. The company recently donated US$225,000 to other companies working on raising the standard of trust online. Government scrutiny, mass surveillance, and data harvesting are all threatening consumer privacy when using the Internet. More and more consumers want to be shielded from unwanted scrutiny, and that situation is also affecting the search engine market right now.
Although there is still a long way to go before companies such as DuckDuckGo can take a real market share away from Google and Bing, things are heading in the right direction. It takes time to gain traction in a market dominated by two players, especially when considering both search engines are operated by two of the largest technology giants in the world. Slowly but surely the public perception of search engines is changing, that much is certain.
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