DuckDuckGo continues to grow in popularity as a privacy-focused alternative to the likes of Google after recently celebrating a milestone 40 million searches every single day, which is six million higher than the previous count from January 2019.
A report released by Merkle in April found that DuckDuckGo was the only Google competitor to record an increase in organic search share during the first three months of the year. Visits to the search engine soared 78% year-over-year.
“In Q1 2019, both saw mobile account for 62% of organic search visits. This is impressive for DuckDuckGo because it did not enjoy the same default search engine status as Google does on iOS and Android devices,” the study noted.
A profile by the New York Times this month highlighted the latest growth for DuckDuckGo and the fact that it has now been profitable since 2014.
While it has become more popular, with a 54% spike in overall searches in Q1, it still only commands an overall organic search visit share of 0.5% in the US, compared to a mammoth 92% for Google. Yahoo and Bing make up the numbers with a 3% and 5% share, respectively.
DuckDuckGo’s focus on privacy does, however, come with a few caveats. The search engine is not as capable as Google at serving personalised content as it does not keep tabs on the behaviour of users. This also means that map results and local searches are less relevant as they do not tap into user location tracking.
