The internet can seem like a dangerous place in 2018. Nothing is sacred anymore; your data is a commodity, your habits are an opportunity to bombard you with products and every word you type is analysed with frightening detail.

Some companies, however, are driving a surge in privacy-oriented browsing. DuckDuckGo has witnessed a marked rise in popularity in the past two years. Since its launch in 2008, the company said it took more than seven years to reach 10 million privacy searches in one day.

From 2015 onward, growth has been staggering, increasing to 20 million by 2017 and in the previous year, it has once again risen to 30 million daily privacy searches.

This rise coincides with repeated, ongoing issues in the tech world. Major cybersecurity breaches, unscrupulous data harvesting techniques and, of course, Cambridge Analytica have all soured the public perception of big tech.

Transparency and Security

While this may be a landmark moment for DuckDuckGo, the US-based company still has a long way to go before considering itself a rival to Google, Bing or Yahoo.

Google alone accounts for 88% of all internet searches in North America. On a global scale, it processes more than 40,000 search queries every second; that’s over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year.

Bing and Yahoo also command sizeable shares in the North American market. Yahoo holds 5.8% of the market share while Bing accounts for 4.9%. DuckDuckGo sits in fourth place, yet processes less than 1% (o.65%) of all searches.

Other search engines with a privacy focus include Qwant, which is also a popular alternative that continues to grow in stature.

To suggest that DuckDuckGo or its counterparts will mount a serious challenge any time soon would be dramatic. Google, to all intents and purposes, is the master of this realm and likely won’t be challenged for a long, long time.

That doesn’t mean the company has suffered over the past 18 months. Since 2017, Google’s share of global searches fell from August onward. While DuckDuckGo hasn’t yet confirmed what it believes to be the underlying cause of this recent success, Google’s decrease, combined with ongoing uncertainty and scandal suggests that other market players could be reaping the benefits of big tech woes.

This widening availability of options and an increased awareness among global users could be fuelling the rise of privacy-oriented search engines and a backlash against market incumbents.

Too Big to Fail

Throughout 2017 and 2018 the same issues and discussions have permeated over the airwaves; Facebook’s dominance of the social media market. Calls to break the company up following the Cambridge Analytica scandal were backed by significant figures in US and European politics alike.

This is unlikely to happen, but once again it underlines the rather disturbing nature of the world we now live in. Some organisations have grown to such a size and with such influence that life seems incomprehensible without them. For alternatives to truly thrive there has to be a hook; a taste of something better for consumers.

DuckDuckGo and other alternative browsing options may come to provide this taste of a quieter life online. People have grown tired of logging onto social media and realising that every character they enter can be used to promote products or put them at risk of exposure to a plethora of bad actors.

Recent data breaches highlight the risk of placing all your eggs in one basket. Facebook announced that millions of its users may have had personal information leaked. This includes your name, gender, address and phone number; all the basics for a potential cybercriminal.

Google, with all of its financial muscle and technical expertise, also fell victim to a breach. More than half a million Google Plus users were exposed due to a bug. For such a damaging breach to occur at a company that processes billions of searches every day, holding information on millions of users, this is concerning, to say the least – and proves that no company or person is truly secure.

Within the space of a week Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the web, offered a solution to our mounting list of privacy quandaries. His solution is to build an open source, user-focused web platform that enables users to command unparalleled control of their data and information.

This alternative appears fruitful at first glace and raised many eyebrows. Berners-Lee also has significant backing in this latest venture, which suggests he’s taking this very seriously.

Once again though, an alternative has been touted and ultimately change rests on consumers to make a choice; operate in a cold online environment or become the master of your own data and privacy.