DuckDuckGo Grows in 2015

December 30, 2015

Do you not love it when the little guy is able to compete with corporate giants? When it comes to search engines DuckDuckGo is the little guy, because unlike big search engines like Google and Yahoo it refuses to track its users browsing history and have targeted ads. According to Quartz, “DuckDuckGo, The Search Engine That Doesn’t Track Its Users, Grew More Than 70% This Year.” Through December 15, 2015, DuckDuckGo received 3.25 billion queries up from twelve million queries received during the same time period in 2014. DuckDuckGo, however, still has trouble cracking the mainstream..

Google is still the biggest search engine in the United States with more than one hundred million monthly searches, but DuckDuckGo only reached 325 million monthly searches in November 2015. The private search engine also has three million direct queries via desktop computers, but it did not share how many people used DuckDuckGo via a mobile device to protect its users’ privacy. Google, on the other hand, is happy to share its statistics as more than half of its searches come from mobile devices.

“What’s driving growth? DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg, reached via email, credits partnerships launched in 2014 with Apple and Mozilla, and word of mouth. He also passes along a Pew study from earlier this year, where 40% of American respondents said they thought search engines ‘shouldn’t retain information about their activity.’… ‘Our biggest challenge is that most people have not heard of us,’ Weinberg says. ‘We very much want to break out into the mainstream.’”

DuckDuckGo offers an unparalleled service for searching. Weinberg stated the problem correctly that DuckDuckGo needs to break into the mainstream. Its current user base consists of technology geeks and those in “the know,” some might call them hipsters. If DuckDuckGo can afford it, how about an advertising campaign launched on Google Ads?

Whitney Grace, December 30, 2015

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Consumer, Data, Google, News, Search, Yahoo

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.