Internet search engine DuckDuckGo is known for its privacy. It doesn’t profile its users and has over 400 sources including Wikipedia. As of last August, it ran on average 65.2 million searches a day. Some of these responses, called Instant Answers, appear on top of the search page and are designed to provide the user with an instant answer that doesn’t require the user to click on a link to find the information that he/she is looking for. To be clear, user searches are not tracked and personal data is not shared with third-person companies.
DuckDuckGo earns money by serving ads from the Yahoo-Bing search alliance network. In 2018, DDG collected $25 million and growth is supposed to reach 30% annually over the next five years eventually topping $100 million during a single year. Last year, the number of searches conducted by DuckDuckGo hit almost 23.7 billion for a 62% year-over-year increase. Exactly one week ago, DDG set a new one day company record with 102,251,307 search requests on January 11th.
Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo vice president of communications, told USA TODAY, “People are coming to us because they want more privacy, and it’s generally spreading through word of mouth. People are looking for alternatives to the surveillance-tech business model.” The search engine is available as an iOS app, an Android app, and an extension on Google Chrome. Nearly 25 million people use the service.
Google and its related apps and platforms such as YouTube, collect personal information from users which are used to drive online ads. This is exactly what DuckDuckGo is seeking to avoid.
