More People Than Ever Are Using DuckDuckGo; Site Says It Observed 14M Searches in One Day This Month (betanews.com)

An anonymous reader shares a BetaNews article: A lot of people are more privacy aware than they have been in the past, and are wary of entrusting everything they search for to Google. That's where privacy-focused sites like DuckDuckGo come in. Its growth since it launched 8 years ago has been nothing short of staggering, with the number of searches skyrocketing since 2013, when Edward Snowden first revealed how the US government was spying on its people. The search site says it has to date served up over 10 billion anonymous searches, with 4 billion of those occurring in the last year alone, and the company says it is growing faster than ever. On January 10 2017, the site received in excess of 14 million private searches.

Comments

Until the money runs out...

[wbr1]

Caveat.. I do not know how DDG is funded. That said, serving that much traffic COSTS. The data they could collect has value. It is likely only a matter of time until one of the following:

1. Company folds due to lack of funds
2. Company sells or reorganizes to collect funds and starts divulging user data to do so.
3. Governments come in and either silently snoop or shut them down.M

Yeah, I am a cynic and have little faith in humanity. Sorry.

Re:Until the money runs out...

[Pascoea]

Affiliate relationships with several companies

That's a pretty vague statement. I don't claim to know anything about DDG, or how they are funded, but that statement to me smells a lot like what Parent Post is concerned about. When your only product is data about what your customers are searching for, what do these "affiliates" have to gain by giving DDG money? Unless these affiliates are just handing over cash, without expecting anything in return.