Audience DuckDuckGo search engine grew by 70% over the year

Privacy as the key to success?

DuckDuckGo, a search engine startup focused on the privacy of its users, continues to grow at a fairly rapid pace.

So, on December 15, the resource reached the level of 3.25 billion search queries for this year, according to published traffic statistics. This is 74% more than in the same period last year. On Monday, December 14, the search engine for the first time scored more than 12 million direct requests.


DuckDuckGo Searches
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However, this is still too small compared to the search industry leader Google. The results of the industry giant can reach more than 100 billion requests per month , while over the past month the number of direct requests for DuckDuckGo was able to exceed the mark of only 325 million. In addition to this, the startup processed an additional 284 million search queries through its API and from bots.

Another one achievement of this year is that the startup was able to attract 3 million unique visitors from desktops in October, according to comScore. This is more than 100% annual growth, although such data does not indicate a very large audience. It should be noted that the focus of the resource on preserving the privacy of its users also complicates the collection of statistics for comScore itself. DuckDuckGo does not disclose the percentage of search queries from mobile devices. For example, Google said that this year more than half of their search queries came from phones and tablets .

What is the growth engine of the project? CEO of startup Gebriel Weinberg (Gabriel Weinberg) believes that partnerships with Apple and Mozilla, concluded in 2014, as well as user recommendations of his resource (they are the usual word of mouth) played a big role.
In addition, he notes a study conducted earlier this year , in which 40% of respondents from America said that search resources "should not save information about their activities." (Google and others use this information, including search queries, to create profiles for targeted advertising, among other things.)
Nevertheless, no action was taken. If 40% of US searches went through DuckDuckGo, they would be more than half of Google’s current results. It seems the motto of the coming 2016 should be the awareness of users. “Our greatest difficulty is that most people have never heard of us,” says Weinberg. “We really want to get into the mainstream.”


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