DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, posted on Twitter this week that in 2018 they surpassed 9 billion searches for the year. To give you a comparison, in 2016 they did 4 billion searches. Not too long ago, in October, they reported doing 30 million queries per day.
DuckDuckGo also said it’s “on pace to shatter that record in 2019.”
More data. According to their published traffic data, they hit over 25 billion searches to date. The current record for most queries in a day was 34,406,841, which was on January 2nd. In 2018 they did 9,239,676,317 queries, in 2017 they did 5,915,745,384 queries.
Why it matters. The continued growth of DuckDuckGo should not be ignored. Their marketing techniques to play the privacy angle has worked to gain them market share and growth. As more and more searchers take notice, SEOs might want to consider to take notice. At this point, DuckDuckGo’s market share is still tiny and most SEOs focus mainly on Google. But let’s keep an eye on them.
About The Author
Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.