2020 was the year when people realized they could do almost everything online. Following this work-from-home trend, more people have become concerned about their Online Privacy and digital fingerprinting. One of the companies to leverage this ongoing concern was DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine.
DuckDuckGo traffic increases by 62 percent
DuckDuckGo increased its traffic by 62% in 2020 alone, which is a positive sign for the privacy-friendly online environment. It means more people were looking for Google alternatives that offer better privacy and security. Even as DuckDuckGo fetches the results from Google, it doesn’t track users or share user-related info with third-party companies.
The team behind DuckDuckGo is delighted that people are going to them, seeing the privacy-friend search engine as a better alternative to the “surveillance-tech business model” of Google. While the company did notice a rise of 62% in average daily traffic, it cannot give us a number.
It happens because the company does not track its users by any means. However, a general estimate is that more than 25 million people use DuckDuckGo as their full-time or occasional search engine. To make it easier for people to make the shift, the company has released its Android, iOS, and Google Chrome apps!
If the ongoing privacy concerns are any signal, DuckDuckGo will witness the numbers rising again. After Facebook, Google has also come under the radar to collect and use user information without offering complete transparency.
Justice departments worldwide have questioned this practice, and Google has also been fined for anti-competition and anti-privacy practices. However small they may have been, all these incidents had increased the mistrust people had towards Google, culminating in a shift to a better option such as DuckDuckGo.
While DuckDuckGo isn’t the only privacy-friendly search engine out there, it is the most popular one as per today’s standards. People who have shifted to DuckDuckGo have noticed an evident change in being tracked across the web.
We should also mention that the company tries its best to add more features, such as smart snippets and quick results. Easy integration options, available even on Google products, are also why people are making the shift.
Read: How Microsoft Bing is more secure and private than Google Search.
