DuckDuckGo received a huge boost yesterday from Apple when it was announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) that the startup search engine will be supported in the new OS X Yosemite, coming this fall.
DuckDuckGo joins Bing and Yahoo as Safari’s other pre-set search alternatives if desktop or mobile users decide to make the switch from the default search option, Google. Bing will remain Siri’s default search engine.
“We are thrilled to be included in Safari and it’s great that Apple is making it easy for people to access our anonymous search option,” DuckDuckGo said in a blog post. “This makes DuckDuckGo the first privacy-focused search engine to be added to one of the top four browsers and is a huge milestone for both us and privacy supporters.”
In the wake of the NSA scandal, DuckDuckGo has gained some traction, particularly in the U.S., where users are concerned about how their search data is being used by major search engines such as Google and Bing, and who might be privy to that search history. More than 1 billion searches were conducted on DuckDuckGo in 2013.
The Apple news follows on DuckDuckGo’s new search design, which launched last month with an emphasis on providing “smarter answers” for searchers.
DuckDuckGo is a fairly small company for a search engine, recently hiring only their 10th employee. Their search results are aggregated from “about 50” sources, both search related and crowdsourced.