New Delhi, Jan 17 (IANS): As people move on to secure messaging apps like Telegram and Signal, privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has surpassed 100 million daily search queries for the first time in its 12-year-old history.

More than 4 million users have installed its app on both Android and iOS app stores and Chrome extension, the company said in a recent tweet.

Launched in 2008, DuckDuckGo's search engine is far behind Google but the latest controversies around user data privacy has helped it gain momentum like Telegram and Signal.

DuckDuckGo has been selected as the default search engine in the highly-secure chat platform Tor Browser, and is often the default search engine in the private browsing modes of several other browsers.

Launched in 2008, DuckDuckGo's search engine is far behind Google, with its average number of searches per day reaching close to 50 million, while Google processes more than 3.5 billion search queries a day.

The DuckDuckGo browser features smarter encryption and private search -- all designed to operate seamlessly together while a user searches and browses the web.

DuckDuckGo also introduced a fully revamped version of its browser extension and mobile app.

The updated app and extension are now available across all major platforms -- Firefox, Safari, Chrome, iOS and Android -- so that a user can easily get all the privacy essentials you need on any device with just one download.

The DuckDuckGo browser extension and mobile app comes with a Privacy Grade rating (A-F) when a user visits a website.

This rating lets the users see at a glance how protected they are, dig into the details to see who the company caught trying to track the user and learn how they have enhanced the underlying website's privacy measures.