DuckDuckGo, the search engine that prioritizes privacy, reached a significant milestone last week, racking up more than 100 million searches in a single day.
According to the search engine’s website, it recorded 102,251,307 searches on Jan. 11, an historical high for the 12-year-old company. For the month, it’s averaging more than 90 million searches a day, a 73 percent increase over the same period in 2020, when the average was around 52 million searches per day.
While still a paltry number compared to the more than five billion daily searches performed by market leader Google, the milestone is a major one for the search engine that doesn’t store any of its users’ personal information, doesn’t archive their search histories, and doesn’t track their search activity.
“It’s a significant milestone, especially since it surpassed Bing and Yahoo to get there,” said Charles King, the principal analyst at Pund-IT, a technology advisory firm in Hayward, Calif.
“That’s a solid sign of DuckDuckGo’s vitality but also reflects the waning influence of what were once dominant industry platforms,” he said.
“There really hasn’t been a significant competitor to lower players like Bing and Yahoo in the search engine game for some time,” added Liz Miller, vice president and a principal analyst at Constellation Research, a technology research and advisory firm in Cupertino, Calif.
