DuckDuckGo reached a historic milestone in a week when both Signal and Telegram saw a huge influx of new users.
DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, reached a milestone in its 12-year history this week when it first recorded more than 100 million search queries on Monday.
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.
DuckDuckGo's popularity comes after the search engine expanded beyond its website as it now offers applications for mobile (Android and iOS), but also a dedicated Chrome extension.
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 millions users installed these apps and extensions, the company said in a tweet in September 2020.
However, the search engine's growing popularity is also due to its goal of not collecting user data and providing the same Results search to all users.
As the company reported last year, this non collection data sometimes makes it difficult to estimate the size of users using 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 movement of course it is not accidental. The new users on Signal and Telegram are the direct result of an announcement Facebook made last week that it will block access to WhatsApp accounts, unless users agree to a new privacy policy that gives Facebook access to more WhatsApp users' data.
On Friday, Facebook postponed the new privacy policy for three months, but the damage had been done, and hundreds of millions of users who remembered their right to privacy joined Massal and Telegram en masse.