Security News > 2021 > July > How DuckDuckGo makes money selling search, not privacy
Commentary: DuckDuckGo is small by Google's standards, but the company is proving it's very possible to make a lot of money with just a bit more privacy.
It's actually a big myth that search engines need to track your personal search history to make money or deliver quality search results.
Almost all of the money search engines make is based on the keywords you type in, without knowing anything about you, including your search history or the seemingly endless amounts of additional data points they have collected about registered and non-registered users alike.
Search advertisers buy search ads by bidding on keywords, not people.
DuckDuckGo search traffic has jumped 55% over the past year, with an estimated 70 to 100 million users.
It's why I just switched my default search engine on Chrome to DuckDuckGo to see if I give anything up by reclaiming a bit of my privacy.