2017 saw an increased demand on online privacy. And when it comes to preserving privacy on search engines, the first that comes up, is DuckDuckGo.
"People all over the world were greeted with nearly daily reminders in the news and elsewhere that their personal information isn't safe online. As a result, privacy continued its growing relevance among mainstream audiences," said DuckDuckGo on its blog post.
The company said that it has experienced a 55 percent growth in daily private searches, compromising its nearly six billion private searches in 2017.
"36 percent of all searches ever entered on DuckDuckGo in our ten-year lifespan were conducted in 2017 alone. We started last year averaging about 12 million private searches daily, and ended the year at about 19 million," said DuckDuckGo.
That's averaging to over 15 million daily private searches for the year.
On its post, DuckDuckGo also announced a $400,000 in donations to privacy organizations (including Freedom of the Press Foundation, World Privacy Forum, Open Whisper Systems, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Tor Project, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and major partnerships with Samsung and Brave.
The privacy-concerned search engine has been touted against Google, the giant of the web.
While it's number of searches is still shy in comparison to Google that handles at least 2 trillion searches per year, DuckDuckGo is playing in a different league because the way it works is not similar to Google's.
One example, is DuckDuckGo in working without tracking users' search history. So in a scenario like when user searched for something about "travelling." when they visit websites, the search engine (notably Google) will tell those sites that the user has searched for travelling before landing on their pages.
For monetization strategy, this is an advantage to Google. Because it knows and tracks users' habits on the web, it can return ads that are more interesting.
On the other hand, DuckDuckGo uses the same kind of model, but played it differently. The search engine uses a syndication model that keeps users' information private, but still allows for it to monetize. In this example, "travelling" is just a word, and it will show only that, without returning personalized ads.
The downside to this, is DuckDuckGo in becoming much less intuitive than Google. But nevertheless, with more people becoming worried about their personal data on the web, DuckDuckGo is having a bright future. And its 2017's increasing amount of queries served, is a solid proof.
What's more, the search engine is also adding some features that should make search experience better. This includes DuckDuckGo in expanding privacy education for users by launching a blog with Device Privacy Tips Guides, a newsletter explaining privacy concepts, and en expanded social media efforts to bring people daily privacy tips on major platforms.