Look out, Google! For the first time in its short history, DuckDuckGo, the little-search-engine-that-could, is racking up over two million daily searches.
It’s an important milestone for the upstart search engine that offers unprecedented levels of privacy. (Remember, DuckDuckGo does not track user IP addresses or search histories.)
It’s probably no coincidence that DuckDuckGo’s big moment comes just days after a massive US web monitoring program was exposed.
While the revelations from fugitive intelligence operative Edward Snowden have been bad news for the US Government, it’s been a bonanza for DuckDuckGo. Company CEO, Gabriel Weinberg has definitely capitalized on the story by making appearances on multiple cable news channels promoting his product.
Even before the Prism story broke DuckDuckGo was experiencing slow, but steady, growth. In February of 2012 the site was clocking in just 1.2 million searches a day.
Of course 2 million searches is just a drop in the bucket for Google – they do around a billion searches every day – but that doesn’t mean that DuckDuckGo isn’t on their radar. Late last year Weinberg said that Google has gone out of its way to make setting DuckDuckGo as a default search engine. (Though that claim is disputed by Google and Search Engine Journal.)
DuckDuckGo is clearly enjoying a moment in the sun but they’ve got a lot of work to do before they’re considered a serious player in the search engine game. Google’s currently got around 65% of the market locked down while Bing has around 17%.
What are your experiences with DuckDuckGo? Do you think it can compete with Google and Bing? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.