DuckDuckGo recently achieved a massive milestone by racking up 10 billion searches since its inception. If that wasn't impressive enough, DuckDuckGo has also enjoyed its biggest day ever, completing 14 million searches in one 24-hour period. And yet most people have still never heard of DuckDuckGo...

DuckDuckGo isn't yet a household name, but it has actually been around since 2008. In the big scheme of things, especially when compared to Google, DuckDuckGo is still the underdog. Or perhaps the underduck. However, DuckDuckGo has grown steadily over the last nine years without gaining much attention.

For the uninitiated, DuckDuckGo is a search engine just like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., but with one major difference... anonymity. DuckDuckGo will search the web for you while protecting your privacy. It promises not to track you, or share any identifiable information about you with third parties.

Putting Privacy First

This policy of putting privacy first has helped DuckDuckGo grow ever more popular. It enjoyed a noticeable increase in its number of users when Edward Snowden revealed how the NSA is tracking everybody. And it's enjoying another noticeable increase as we speak for obvious reasons.

In a celebratory blog post, DuckDuckGo CEO and Founder Gabriel Weinberg has announced that the search engine has now completed 10 billion searches. An impressive 4 billion of those took place in 2016. And on January 10, 2017, DuckDuckGo completed 14 million searches in one day.

This is mightily impressive. However, to put it in context, according to The Verge, Google completes around 40,000 searches every second, which equates to 3.5 billion searches every day. So in just three days Google completes the same number of searches as DuckDuckGo has managed in its lifetime.

The World's Most Trusted Search Engine?

DuckDuckGo is unlikely to ever be the most popular search engine in the world, but it continues to grow at a steady pace. And for a website that's on a mission to be "the world’s most trusted search engine," perhaps being popular isn't considered the true measure of success.

Do you use DuckDuckGo on a regular basis? If so, why do you use DuckDuckGo over Google, Bing, or one of the other, bigger search engines? Is this the first time you've heard of DuckDuckGo? If so, will you now be trying it out? Please let us know in the comments below!