Security News > 2022 > January > Online privacy: DuckDuckGo just finished a banner year and looks for an even better 2022
Commentary: The privacy-oriented search engine keeps winning fans.
The privacy-oriented search engine netted more than 35 billion search queries in 2021, a 46.4% jump over 2020.
The company, which bills itself as the "Internet privacy company," offering a search engine and other products designed to "Empower you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online without any tradeoffs," remains a rounding error compared to Google in search.
Whether it remains a highly successful rounding error could depend on how serious we become about the privacy of our searches.
Google builds a dossier using those searches, all in the name of serving up "Relevant ads." That idea of "Relevance" is nonsense, as DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg has argued: "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."
The company is now pushing well beyond search to enable things like email protection, app tracking protection, and more.