14 DAY TRIAL // DuckDuckGo, the private search engine, announced that 2013 ended in over 1 billion searches via its platform. Adding up the searches performed via DuckDuckGo’s API and bots, the number grows to over 7 billion.
In 2013, perhaps the most discussed topic generated by the NSA scandal was that of privacy. Google, whether it knowingly worked with the intelligence agency or not, had its name dragged into the entire situation.
Still, the company might have cleared its name to some extent in the past months, partly thanks to new reports and to the company’s efforts to minimize government surveillance.
However, the fact remains – Google tracks its users, stores and uses their data to help improve its own tools. While efficiency may be on the company’s mind, users have shown concern that their online privacy is violated bit by bit when using Google’s tools.
This is one of the reasons why some have chosen to switch to another search engine. DuckDuckGo has been one of the popular alternatives to those seeking more privacy. The service stores no private data on its users, which is the main reason why so many have chosen it.
Back in June, the company barely saw a few million searches per day, but the number quickly grew to about 4 million, a trend that continued throughout the year, mainly due to the NSA scandal.
While it’s quite impressive that DuckDuckGo managed to grow so much in such a short time, Google is certainly not feeling threatened. And that’s because the Internet giant handles in a single day nearly 6 billion searches.
Statistics shows that in 2013 alone, Google handled over 2,160 billion searches and the number is constantly growing. For instance, in 2012, “only” 1,873 billion searches were ran through Google.
