Tuesday, January 19th 2021
Privacy Focused DuckDuckGo Search Engine Surpasses 100 Million Daily Searches
The privacy-focused DuckDuckGo search engine has seen tremendous growth recently surpassing 100 million daily searches on January 11th 2021. DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from competing search engines by not customizing ads to a specific user instead showing ads purely based on the search term. Since DuckDuckGo was launched in 2008 they have grown from processing 100,000 searches a day to now over 100 million searches daily. For comparison, Google processes roughly 5.5 billion searches a day and Bing 200 million so while DuckDuckGo still has a long way to go to becoming a household name they have made remarkable progress. This latest round of growth can be attributed to the upcoming WhatsApp privacy policy changes which have reminded consumers of the importance of internet privacy and security.
Source:
DuckDuckGo
25 Comments on Privacy Focused DuckDuckGo Search Engine Surpasses 100 Million Daily Searches
Bing works like old google that's why Bing is coming up.
I use both fairly interchangeably for now, results are sometimes more relevant in one, sometimes in the other, no clear winner in that regard IMO.
For me, DDG has been the one and only for a year now. If I do use Google, I find myself ending up in the same places all the time to find what I need. And if I use DDG, I find myself looking around a bit longer, sometimes missing the correct info for the search I entered, and then a few clicks later still find what I need.
Its a paradoxical thing. Either you let Google lead you through the woods of the internet, and you lose your chance to keep an open mind to the many sources available, or you use DDG and you see the internet for what it really is: a massive bin of information where you have to do careful selection and actually read what you're clicking on.
I prefer the latter now. And using DDG has not ONCE left me not finding what I needed, or needing a lot of time to find it. Sometimes its a second search, more often than not, I just get what I need right away. That's a small sacrifice for having a real view on what's what, and not one directed by Google's agenda. The influence is bigger than you might think, small nudges every day can create an alternate reality - look at recent events.
I find the !bangs feature especially helpful. For instance, if I want to search for videos of dogs on YouTube, I can type into Firefox “dogs !yt”. Or if I want to bring up the AMD article on Wikipedia, I can type “amd !w” and I’m taken straight to the page.
'Let's duck it'?
Or just
I remember DDG being shady about some privacy policy's in the past, but I don't remember what exactly was is.
Qwant and Startpage are also viable alts. The are SFW friendly.
I am not surprised about Bing's numbers, after all, m$ crams it down your throat with IE and Edge as the default search engine. Same with Google and Chromecast. Too many people either dont bother, or remain spectacularly clueless, trying to add/change their browsers search engine, privacy be damned.
Oh and Startpage is not to be trusted anymore, they sold out to some Ad group ( restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-group/ )
I do however mostly use google because everytime I try to switch I give up in frustration over the horrendously bad search results relative to what I search for. Maybe I am just too used to using google and how to corrently phrase my searches there to get the results I am after. But everytime I am trying to find some more obscure thing or problem solve something and I use DDG, its as horrible as using bing back in the days. About as useful as asking a magic 8 ball, which isnt helpful at all.
Hopefully it improves though.
I do notice that quite often though, I have a couple of friends who use nothing but DDG and they ask me help when they cant find what they need. Generally its in the top 3 options on google when I search for them. So they cant find it at all, top result in google when I try. Not exactly great.