【Lena Paul - The Next Morning】

In an age where it seems nearly every major internet service is Lena Paul - The Next Morninglooking to hawk your personal data, one pro-privacy search engine is experiencing massive growth.

DuckDuckGo, which bills itself as “the search engine that doesn't track you,” has just hit 30 million daily searches. According to the company, this is a new daily record for the search engine. DuckDuckGo makes its traffic stats publicly available in an effort to be as transparent as possible.

This new company record is about a 50% increase from its record of over 20 million searches in 2017. DuckDuckGo’s reached this new daily search record just this past Monday.

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As pointed out by Search Engine Journal, it’s interesting to note that DuckDuckGo’s new daily search record comes just days after news broke that Google exposed nearly 500,000 of its users’ data.

While there’s no proof of causation, DuckDuckGo cites previous similarly ecosystem altering events in its traffic data. The privacy-focused search engine notes a rise in usage after events like Google’s privacy policy change in early 2012 and Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks.

While DuckDuckGo is a long way from competing with reigning search king Google, which receives over 3.5 billion daily search queries and makes up 77 percent of the search market share, the niche privacy-first search engine is pulling it all off with only 53 employees.

In fact, DuckDuckGo has already surpassed companies in the search space that are many times its size. The Verge notes that with DuckDuckGo representing 0.18 percent of the global search market share, its now ranking ahead of AOL, a former giant in the industry.

DuckDuckGo may be a tiny operation compared to giants like Google, but its explosive growth is proof that between privacy leaks and data hacks, even the average internet users are seeking out services that value their personal information.