DuckDuckGo reached a historic milestone during a week when both Signal and Telegram saw an enormous influx of latest users.
Privacy-focused program DuckDuckGo reached a serious milestone in its 12-year-old history in the week when it recorded on Monday its first-ever day with quite 100 million user search queries.
The achievement comes after a period of sustained growth the corporation has been seeing for the past two years, and particularly since August 2020, when the program began seeing more than 2 billion search queries a month on a daily basis.
DuckDuckGo’s popularity comes after the program has expanded beyond its own site and now offers mobile apps for Android and iOS, but also a fanatical Chrome extension.
More than 4 million users installed these apps and extensions, the corporate said during a tweet in September 2020.
But the search engine’s rising popularity is additionally thanks to its stated goal of not collecting user data and providing equivalent search results to all or any users.
As it highlighted last year, this lack of granular data sometimes makes it hard for the company to even estimate the size of its own user base.
But this dedication to privacy has also helped the corporate gain a following among the privacy-conscious crowd. DuckDuckGo has been selected as the default program within the Tor Browser and is usually the default program within the private browsing modes of several other browsers.
HISTORIC WEEK FOR PRIVACY APPS
DuckDuckGo’s historical milestone comes during a week when both Signal and Telegram, two other privacy-centric apps, also announced major periods of growth.
Telegram announced on Monday that it reached 500 million registered users, while Signal’s servers went down on Friday after seeing “millions upon many new users” during a sudden influx the company said exceeded even its most optimistic projections.
Both spikes in new users for Signal and Telegram are immediate results of a serious PR snafu at Facebook after the corporation announced last week it might be blocking access to WhatsApp accounts unless users agreed to a replacement privacy policy that granted Facebook access to more WhatsApp user data.
Yesterday, on Friday, Facebook delayed the new privacy policy by three months, but by that time , the damage had been done, and many many users were reminded of their right to privacy, flocking to Signal and Telegram — but it wouldn’t be a stretch to think that a lot of users were reminded to use DuckDuckGo rather than Google either.
