Search Growth on DuckDuckGo Tripled at the End of 2014

DuckDuckGo, the upstart Internet search engine that reuses to employ tracking techniques used by larger competitors like Google, experienced tremendous growth at the end of last year. At the end of 2013, the site was seeing just over 3.5 million search requests per day. At the end of 2014, that number doubled, but the more impressive stat is the growth the search engine saw at the end of the year. From January through August, DuckDuckGo’s average monthly query growth was about 3.5 percent. For the year’s final four months, growth averaged over 10 percent. The site’s growth shows that the company is growing, and may just end up being a viable competitor to Google other search engines.

Unlike Google, Yahoo, and many other search engines, DuckDuckGo operates on a pledge to protect users’ privacy and security. DuckDuckGo doesn’t store users’ search history or share users searches with third parties, and does not track users’ computer and location information. The big search engines all employ those practices and more in an attempt to increase advertising revenue. While DuckDuckGo is still millions of queries behind industry leader Google, 2014 was the second year in a row with impressive growth. The company benefited last year from reaching agreements with Apple and Mozilla, whose Firefox browser is a chief rival of Google’s Chrome. In September, Apple began including DuckDuckGo as a search option in its Safari browser, then Mozilla began including it in Firefox about two months later. Both deals drove surges in DuckDuckGo’s daily search queries. Of course, DuckDuckGo’s most significant growth spurt came in 2013, when it was reported that the government was monitoring Americans’ online activity.