The privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo announced that it surpassed 9 billion searches for the year 2018. And that it said it’s “on pace to shatter that record in 2019.”
For comparison, the search engine did 3 billion searches in 2015. In 2016, it reached 4 billion. The search engine again surpassed that number in 2017 when it processed almost 6 billion queries.
What this means, throughout 2018, the search engine made more than 3 billion gain, which is indeed impressive. Back in October 2018, the company said that it was receiving around 30 million queries per day.
According to its traffic measurements page, the search engine processes around 33 million direct queries per day, 3 million from its API, and 2 million from bots.
The January 2019 record before DuckDuckGo announced the milestone, was on January 2nd, where the search engine processed 34,406,841 queries.
DuckDuckGo served over 9 Billion private searches in 2018 (and is on pace to shatter that record in 2019)!
Despite our traffic growth, though, the number of personal profiles we store remains unchanged.
It's still zero.https://t.co/qlSaz4j9ZH pic.twitter.com/LZ5IIcreDo— DuckDuckGo (@DuckDuckGo) January 3, 2019
The continued growth of DuckDuckGo should not be ignored.
As more people are becoming aware of their online privacy and how tech companies thrive on their data, DuckDuckGo takes a unique role where people can browse the internet without being tracked. This approach enables DuckDuckGo to sneak between those tech giants, and gain market share as well as growth.
But still, DuckDuckGo's impressive achievement is shy from Google, which continues to dominate the market.
The search giant Google is said to process around 40,000 queries per second, and receiving about 3.5 billion queries per day.
Annually, Google handles approximately 1.2 trillion. To put that into comparison, DuckDuckGo's 9 billion is only about 0.0075 percent of Google's.