People Are Increasingly Choosing Private Web Search
DuckDuckGo has had a banner year:
And yet, DuckDuckGo. The privacy-oriented search engine netted more than 35 billion search queries in 2021, a 46.4% jump over 2020 (23.6 billion). That’s big. Even so, the company, which bills itself as the “Internet privacy company,” offering a search engine and other products designed to “empower you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online without any tradeoffs,” remains a rounding error compared to Google in search.
I use it. It’s not as a good a search engine as Google. Or, at least, Google often gets me what I want faster than DuckDuckGo does. To solve that, I use use the feature that allows me to use Google’s search engine through DuckDuckGo: prepend “!Google” to searches. Basically, DuckDuckGo launders my search.
EDITED TO ADD (1/12): I was wrong. DuckDuckGo does not provide privacy protections when searching using Google.
tfb • January 6, 2022 6:57 AM
35E9 searches sounds like a lot. But perhaps I do 10 searches a day (I do more), so 3.5E3/y so that’s 10E6 active users if ‘active’ means 10 searches/day. They have a survey mentioned in the article which says 27E6 people in the US use it so if you guess 35E6 globally that means 3 searches/day each perhaps. Perhaps most people don’t search very much? Or perhaps people say they use it but don’t very much. Well, anyway, say about 30 million, so this is 1% of Facebook. Which isn’t that bad, actually.
(Note I’ve used DDG for a long time & I’m not disputing their numbers, I just wanted to work out what they mean as ‘searches/year’ is not a very helpful number I think.)