DuckDuckGo reached a historic milestone in a week when both Signal and Telegram they saw a huge influx of new users.
DuckDuckGo is one searching machine focused on privacy, reached a major milestone in its 12-year history this week when on Monday it recorded more than 100 for the first time millions search queries.
The achievement comes after a period of steady growth over the past two years, and especially since August 2020, when the search engine began receiving over 2 billion search queries per month on a regular basis.
The popularity of DuckDuckGo comes after the extension of the search engine beyond its website as it now offers mobile applications (Android and iOS), but also an exclusive extension of Chrome.
Signal is blowing all records, and DuckDuckGo just passed 100,000,000 searches in a day. Privacy is cool???? ???? https://t.co/o3Oa9Pxe3m
- DHH (@dhh) January 16, 2021
More than 4 million users have installed these applications and extensions, the company said in a tweet in September 2020.
However, the growing popularity of the search engine is also due to its goal of not collecting user data and providing the same search results to all users.
As the company said last year, this non-collection of data sometimes makes it difficult to estimate the size of the users who use it.
The historic DuckDuckGo milestone comes at a time when both Signal and Telegram, two other privacy applications, have also announced significant growth periods.
Telegram announced on Monday that it had reached 500 million registered users, while Signal's servers collapsed on Friday when "millions of new users" began to arrive, the company said, exceeding even its most optimistic forecasts.
We have been adding new servers and extra capacity at a record pace every single day this week nonstop, but today exceeded even our most optimistic projections. Millions upon millions of new users are sending a message that privacy matters. We appreciate your patience.
- Signal (@signalapp) January 15, 2021
This move is of course not accidental. New users at Signal and Telegram are the direct result of a Facebook announcement last week that it will block access to WhatsApp accounts, unless users agree to a new one Privacy Policy which gives Facebook access to more data of WhatsApp users.
On Friday, Facebook postponed the new privacy policy for three months, but the damage was done, and hundreds of millions of users who remembered their right to protection of privacy, entered Signal and Telegram en masse.
