DuckDuckGo Reaches 30 Million Queries Per Day

DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focussed search engine, recently hit the milestone of 30 million search queries per day. We discuss our take on the news in the latest episode of our Industry Spotlight series…

See below for the full video transcription.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:

Lee: The next thing we’re going to cover is DuckDuckGo reaching 30 million queries a day. DuckDuckGo is the privacy-focused search engine that doesn’t track your movements and serve you ads. It’s basically the polar opposite of Google. It’s been growing in popularity for quite a few years, I think about 50% year on year. So they’ve recently reached the milestone of 30 million queries a day, which is a significant milestone for those guys. It’s still a tiny, tiny percentage of the whole search market. 

Jamie: I was going to say, what’s Google per day? About 100 billion or something? 

Lee: Yeah something absolutely ridiculous. But the interesting thing about them continuing to grow is I think this year has been quite a privacy-focused year for Google, for Facebook, people like that so privacy is becoming…I don’t think it’s becoming more important. I think it’s becoming more discussed. 

Jamie: More relevant.

Lee: More relevant, definitely. So I think that will be contributing to this growth as well. But I don’t think Google need to be worried but I’m happy for DuckDuckGo. But, yeah, I think the GDPR regulations and Google getting a lot of bad coverage for what they’re doing with the data is pushing people to just explore routes where they don’t have to be concerned about privacy. 

Chris: How do they monetize it? 

Jamie: No, there are ads aren’t there. They’re just not ads based on tracking. Keyword based ads, right? 

Chris: Do they sell their data?

Jamie: Type something in. There you go. At the top.

Lee: All right. Okay. So they have got an ad platform, yeah.

Jamie: Yeah, but the key is it’s not based on you visiting other sites. It’s just based on the words that you’re searching for.

Chris: Keywords. Yeah, so they don’t do any, like, retargeting or cookies or anything like that. It’s pretty much the same as Bing. Bing don’t really offer a remarketing suite, only in search. You must be talking really small volume for that though.

Lee: Well 30 million queries a day is the max. That’s what they’re maxing out at. 

Jamie: I wonder if it might be worth exploring that in more detail, Chris. No? Yeah? I wonder if it’s relevant to more markets than others for search volume. Maybe like insurance quotes and stuff like that. Or like finance. 

Chris: I would imagine you’d only move any activity over there if you’d absolutely saturated every other major search engine. You’re not going to start there and scale up. You’re going to start where…

Jamie: Yeah, where everyone is.

Chris: I mean, who was that advertiser that was there? At the top? UnderArmour or something like that?

Lee: I’ll double check. Live search. 

Chris: Football boots. 

Lee: UnderArmour, yeah. 

Chris: They’ll be probably slamming Google and Bing, I would imagine, and it’s just to squeeze a little bit more out of what’s there. 

Jamie: Well, they’re different type of users, aren’t they, because you imagine people, I don’t know. 

Chris: I don’t know. I don’t know what the demographic is for it. Who would do searches on this?

Jamie: Security-conscious, privacy-conscious IT professionals maybe. 

Lee: Nearly said something really controversial then. So DuckDuckGo’s doing well.

Jamie: Good. Need more competition. Keep going.