DuckDuckGo On The Decline – Fewer Queries

Looks like DuckDuckGo, the privacy focused search engine, is on the decline. In January 2021 it broke the 100 million searches per day mark but since April 2022 of this year, it has dipped below that mark each month.

I plotted the average queries per day by month from DuckDuckGo’s traffic numbers and you can see, the big dip started to happen in March 2022 with April for the first time going below the 100 million mark since 2021.

On March 9, 2022, Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo said in on Twitter that DuckDuckGo will down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation, a move which some users criticized as censorship and a violation of the search engine’s commitment to “unbiased search,” Wikipedia explained. In May 2022, a report from Bleeping Computer by security researcher Zach Edwards found that DuckDuckGo’s web browser allows Microsoft’s trackers to continue running while visiting non-DuckDuckGo websites, contrary to Google and Facebook trackers, which are blocked, explained Wikipedia.

It makes you wonder if these recent actions by DuckDuckGo contributed to the decline in queries? Maybe it is less advertising? Or maybe it will be a short lived decline?

Forum discussion at Twitter.