Ride the Lightning

DuckDuckGo Flying High on Privacy Concerns

January 26, 2017

Naked Security posted Tuesday about how much it likes DuckDuckGo as a search engine. I am happy to join that chorus and delighted at how well DuckDuckGo is doing.

DuckDuckGo's privacy-focused approach to search is something I often lecture about to lawyers. Now it has passed a milestone, with a total of 10 billion searches since it was founded in 2008, with 4 billion of those searches taking place last year.

It still has a tiny market share, with an overall total of about 0.12% of the user base, but that still puts it ahead of AOL, formerly the king of search. Google of course tops the list, with Bing, Yahoo and the Chinese provider Baidu well out in front of it.

DuckDuckGo has been growing quickly, especially in the past couple of years, reaching another milestone last week when it hit 14 million searches on one day. Its popularity has grown steadily since the Snowden revelations and also picked up speed in 2014 when it became a search option in iOS.

If you haven't tried DuckDuckGo yet and you give a damn about your searches being private, maybe this is the time to take a test drive.

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