Privacy-focused DuckDuckGo’s organic search visits grow by 54%: Report

The 10-year-old DuckDuckGo gains traction as Google and other search engines fail to address privacy concerns.

DuckDuckGo is becoming popular, should Google be worried? (REUTERS)

DuckDuckGo has been around for years but it has started to get everyone's attention recently. With users becoming more aware about internet companies' tracking and targeted advertising, DuckDuckGo is gaining popularity, thanks to a range of privacy features. Now, a report suggests DuckDuckGo is outpacing many other search engines.

According to Merkle's Q1 2019 Digital Marketing Report, DuckDuckGo saw a growth of 78% year-on-year in terms of organic search visits while the overall search visits improved by 54%. Google slipped in terms of organic search by 2% in the first quarter of this year. The mobile search visits, however, grew by 6%, according to the report. Other search engines like Bing and Yahoo didn't grow the way DuckDuckGo did.

"As recently as Q4 2017, mobile devices generated just 46% of DuckDuckGo organic search traffic, compared to 56% for Google," Andy Taylor, Director of Research at Merkle is quoted as saying. "Over the past year, though, mobile share of both engines has trended remarkably close. In Q1 2019, both saw mobile account for 62% of organic search visits."

Founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo's proposition to offer an anonymous search engine has seen many takers recently. Privacy-conscious users have long criticised the data-mining based targeted advertising policies of different tech companies including Facebook and Google. DuckDuckGo tries to address this problem with a search engine that blocks sites from tracking you along with giving a search page that's on par with Google's.

According to DuckDuckGo's own data, the search engine saw a steep increase in visits between 2017 and 2019. Last year, the platform saw 9,239,676,317 direct queries, higher than 5,915,745,384 direct queries in 2017.