TECH

DuckDuckGo reaches 30 million daily searches

Google has a new competitor and its gaining popularity quick. DuckDuckGo, a new privacy-focused search engine just recorded 30 million direct searches in a day.It is the number twice this week before seeing a minor drop. The growth is a clear indication that privacy is quickly becoming a major concern of web-users.Companies like Google and Facebook are failing to protect their users from data breaches. Personal information is at risk all the time.But even with its rapid growth, Google's 3.5 billion searches a day are just too big of a challenge for DuckDuckGo.Google is not the only competitor DuckDuckGo needs to deal with. The search engine is still behind others like Yahoo, Bing, and even Ask.com. DuckDuckGo roughly claims 5 percent of the search engine market on a good day.The unique selling point of DuckDuckGo is its privacy, whereas Google just faced the breach date. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) is asking the FTC to look into Google's latest data leak.There are allegations that Google is not only exposed data of Google+ members to developers but also choose not to disclose the data leak for over 7 months.The glitch in Google's system allowed 438 developers to access personal data. While none of the developers reached the data as no one knew about the glitch, it was still a major security threat. Google fixed the issue in March but did not disclose the breach until this month due to bad publicity and regulatory scrutiny.There is no meaningful consumer protection law that limits these companies to keep personal data secured. The rising level of mistrust between the user, social media platforms, and search engines are the main reasons websites like DuckDuckGo are gaining popularity.However, they still have a long way to go before Google and other search engines start seeing them as a threat.



Sinkandar Mahmood