Search engine DuckDuckGo has reached a new milestone surpassing 100 million searches in one day as users migrate toward privacy-focused services.
The milestone happened with little fanfare last Monday as DuckDuckGo reached a personal best 102 million searches, according to its own metrics.
DuckDuckGo was founded in 2008 as a privacy-focused alternative to Google Search.
The company’s revenue model does not rely on storing and selling personal data; instead of showing advertisements based on a user-profile, DuckDuckGo delivers ads based only on search terms.
Over the past decade, the number of people using DuckDuckGo has steadily climbed with the search engine having just under one billion queries in 2011 and 23.6 billion in 2020.
That pales in comparison to Google which had 1.2 trillion searches back in 2012.
DuckDuckGo reached the 100 million daily search milestone last week. Source: DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo’s positioning as a sort of anti-Google has given the search engine more attention during the most recent trend of privacy concerns sparked by WhatsApp changing its privacy settings.
News of messaging service WhatsApp sharing user data to its parent company Facebook – which it has done for years – caused a surge of users migrating to non-profit private messaging app Signal.
The company relies on donations to stay afloat and was forced to massively scale-up its infrastructure as it experienced a period of unprecedented growth.
We have been adding new servers and extra capacity at a record pace every single day this week nonstop, but today exceeded even our most optimistic projections. Millions upon millions of new users are sending a message that privacy matters. We appreciate your patience.
— Signal (@signalapp) January 15, 2021
By Saturday, the sudden rush of new users caused technical problems for Signal as its teams tried desperately to increase capacity.
The rise of Signal also coincided with tech giants banning Donald Trump and his supporters following the Capitol Hill riots.
