Search engine DuckDuckGo is just over five years old, and has quite a bit to celebrate. In a recent announcement, the search engine proclaimed it served more than 1 billion searches in 2013.
Looking back on the year, the search engine appeared to experience highs that correlated heavily with current events, which DuckDuckGo annotates here.
See the annotation marked “I”? That’s when DuckDuckGo says revelations about government surveillance began surrounding the NSA PRISM surveillance scandal. From summer to fall of 2013, traffic on DuckDuckGo grew from just under 2 million searches on June 6 to more than 4 million on November 10, 2013.
Last year, its “anonymous search” angle gave people an outlet for search after the PRISM leaks caused widespread concern over privacy. And even though major search engines denied involvement in PRISM, many still questioned how mainstream engines stored and used data when Web browsing.
In September, Google made its move to 100 percent encrypted search.
But it’s not just encrypted search that DuckDuckGo says makes its search engine different. The search engine says it’s better because it:
- Has less spam and clutter by aggressively filtering content farms, only having one ad on results pages and so on.
- Showcases better instant answers “via partners like Wolfram Alpha and by developers contributing via our instant answer platform.”
- Doesn’t put users in a filter bubble. “We don’t bias search results towards what we think particular users would already agree with.”
To give DuckDuckGo a try, check it out here.
