DuckDuckGo Reaches 2 Million Searches in One Day
If you’re among the many who feel that Google digs a little too far into your personal life and violates your privacy, you’ve probably heard of DuckDuckGo, the search engine whose most-touted feature is the fact that they fully respect user privacy.
Although Google absolutely dominates search market share, with several times the daily searches of even its biggest competitors like Yahoo and Bing, there’s still room for smaller search services like DuckDuckGo. In fact, DuckDuckGo is actually gaining ground, recently hitting two million searches in a single day.
A Big Day for the Underdog
According to a news post on Search Engine Land, DuckDuckGo reached over 2.21 million “direct searches” yesterday, a jump of approximately 400,000 from the previous day. Search Engine Land clarifies that direct searches are only those done by actual people on the DuckDuckGo website, excluding searches conducted through APIs and bots. On average for June, DuckDuckGo has been getting over 16 million of these types of searches per day.
It seems apparent that the recent uptick in DuckDuckGo’s traffic levels is a direct result of the ongoing scandal in which the major search engines, including Yahoo, Microsoft and Bing, are believed to be distributing user data to the federal government. Since DuckDuckGo doesn’t collect this type of data in the first place, they’d have nothing to send to the government, regardless of what the government requests.
DuckDuckGo actually isn’t a brand new search engine; back in February of 2012, they hit one million searches due to publicity from Data Privacy Day. Average traffic levels dropped off slightly after this, but the momentum of breaking two million searches in one day is more difficult to stop, especially when data privacy concerns are at the tip of everyone’s tongues.
At the same time, it’s important to put some perspective on the situation. DuckDuckGo is thrilled to get over two million direct searches in one day, while Google gets over a billion searches – every day.
