When it first launched, DuckDuckGo seemed like it couldn’t possibly be serious. A tiny, Philadelphia-based search engine going up against Google? Indeed, its early growth was glacial, despite offering itself as a less invasive search engine that doesn’t track your online behavior. But then history intervened: Two years ago, Edward Snowden blew the whistle on NSA spying and American attitudes about privacy shifted. DuckDuckGo been exploding ever since.

Over the last two years, DuckDuckGo’s daily search queries have grown 600%, CEO Gabriel Weinberg told CNBC recently. The privacy-focused search engine is now on track to hit 10 million daily queries for the first time, a milestone that it could hit as early as next week. This follows two solid years of dramatic, upward growth on DuckDuckGo’s traffic charts. And not coincidentally, it comes at a time when public concerns about digital privacy are high.

Last month, a survey from the Pew Research Center revealed that 40% of U.S. adults don’t want their search engine provider to retain any information about them at all. Fortunately for Weinberg, that’s precisely the concept he was going for when he launched DuckDuckGo back in 2008.





“People are finally becoming aware of all the downsides of online tracking, including surveillance, ads following you around the Internet, and being charged different prices based on your profile,” Weinberg told Fast Company. “If you can get both a great experience and privacy at the same time, then it’s really a no-brainer to switch to a private alternative and prevent yourself from being tracked.”

The premise of DuckDuckGo is simple: It doesn’t track your searches or any other online activity. Whereas Google has built a $66 billion dollar-a-year business around knowing more and more about its users’ every click, tap, and scroll, DuckDuckGo prefers ignorance. It doesn’t have user logins, it doesn’t log your search history or IP address. Even if they wanted to hand over data about your search history, they couldn’t. That data just doesn’t exist.

Instead of profiting from heaps of user data, DuckDuckGo has opted for a simpler business model: Old-school search ads that pair the keywords in people’s queries with relevant ads placed by the highest bidder. Weinberg says the company also makes money from affiliate links to sites like Amazon and eBay.

For DuckDuckGo, this huge increase in search volume has led to a corresponding jump in revenue, which has enabled the company to hire new people. Since the beginning of 2014, DuckDuckGo’s head count has doubled, today totaling 28 full-time equivalent employees, most of whom work remotely outside of the company’s headquarters in suburban Philadelphia. All of DuckDuckGo’s employees are hired from the existing community of the search engine’s developers and contributors, a factor Weinberg attributes to a very low turnover rate.