DuckDuckGo integrato into iOS 8 and OS X: Apple gives a boost to the 'anti-Google'
Privacy-focused search engine doesn't track users over multiple searches
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Your support makes all the difference.It was one of the more surprising (and low key) announcements from Apple’s developer conference this week, but all future versions of the company’s operating systems will include DuckDuckGo - the “first privacy-focused search engine” - as built-in option for the Safari browser.
DuckDuckGo positions itself as the ‘anti-Google’ and doesn’t track its users over multiple searches; instead it serves ads based only on the keywords from any single search.
This means that advertisers can still try and sell you life insurance if you search for it, but they won’t have access to a detailed customer profile that joins up lots of different data points from a longer period of time.
DuckDuckGo is still a tiny service compared to the likes of Google (it handles just over 5 million daily searches compared to Google’s 5.9 billion) but becoming a built-in option for iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite users could certainly give it a sizeable boost.
Apple devices might not control the greatest market share when it comes to making or breaking a browser, but they do offer access to the more affluent demographics prized by advertisers.
The iPhone-maker continues to swing back and forth between Google and Microsoft’s Bing, making the latter the default search engine for all queries in Siri in iOS 7.
Google remains the default for web searches (and can be used in voice searches by simply saying ‘Google’) but Apple’s inclusion of DuckDuckGo shows that the company is happy to look outside the traditional players in the search industry to keep customers happy.
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