DuckDuckGo reaches 30 million queries per day

DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, posted on Twitter that it has reached a new milestone, breaking 30 million queries per day on average.

50 percent growth. The company said it took seven years to reach 10 million searches in one day. To get to 20 million searches, it took another two years. Now, less than a year later, it is now at 30 million searches per day.

The growth keeps on increasing as you can tell from the published traffic charts:

Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, told TechCrunch, “We’ve been growing by approximately 50% a year pretty consistently so at a macro level it isn’t too surprising, just the numbers are getting bigger!”

Weinberg added, “That said it has been even increased on top of that this year, especially in the past two months.”

Why it matters. DuckDuckGo’s search engine offers an alternative to Google, Bing and other search engines that collect and use behavioral data for ad targeting both on and off their services.

Compared to the tens of billions of searches Google processes per day, DuckDuckGo’s volume barely registers, but the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and talk of privacy regulation in the U.S. have raised public awareness about online data security concerns and may help spur continued growth for privacy-centric initiatives.