It was announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference “WWDC” in San Francisco that Apple is adding this fall a new Search Engine as built-in option for the Safari browser on its new Operating System upgraded MAC OS X Yosemite; an experience which will continue with all the future versions of the company’s Operating Systems. This surprising announcement is a sizeable boost to DuckDuckGo and suggests that Apple is slowly moving away from the world’s most popular engine search Google.
This new player in the search engine field will join the club of Safari browser search engine option (Google, Bing and Yahoo). Just to know, Google is still the default search engine on Safari. But who knows, may be this opportunity of becoming Safari’s other pre-set search alternatives could certainly give a huge boost and may let the chance to DuckDuckGo to gain market and compete with Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo.com. The fact that Apple’s inclusion of DuckDuckGo, shows that they are looking outside the traditional players to please the new and the long-term users.
Previously in the old versions of OS and IOS, DuckDuckGo could only be used as an add-on. From now on, the installed versions will default to Google and we can be sure that DuckDuckGo will be available as a secondary choice.
DuckDuckGo focuses on smarter answers and a more refined look, it has given itself a new attractive, customizable and reimagined design that adds places, images and incorporates autosuggest and more into its search results. DuckDuckGo have even added a new “Give Feedback Button” to show to their users that they incorporate theirs feedbacks to improve the search engine.
By the way, the DuckDuckGo startup which has been operating for 4 years now, was celebrating Few months ago 1 billion searches. For the moment, the company is averaging nearly 5 million queries per day according to the search engine (compared to Google’s 5.9 billion).
Since the news hit about the NSA PRISM surveillance program in the USA, users becomes more and more concerned about their privacy, about how their search data is being used by major search engine (especially Google and Bing) And what exactly search engines are tracking about them. Accordingly, the NSA scandal has turned in favor of the DuckDuckGo startup because more researches were conducted to it.
Moreover, DuckDuckGo is focusing mainly on user privacy and assert that they don’t track its users over multiple searches. As an alternative to that, they do serve advertisings based only on the keywords from any single search (no customer profile is created that joins up different data elements from a long period of time), they also state the use of these ads adhere to their privacy policy.
The OS X Yosemite update page will be available soon for public download; at the same time, we hope that the cooperation between Apple and DuckDuckGo can give users more control over their privacy on the web.
Loukmane Aboussaid