Apple made several rather significant announcements this week at its Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), but none more important to Internet professionals and search marketers than that DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn't track its users, would be included in future version of Safari on iOS and OS X.
"DuckDuckGo is thrilled to be included in Safari," said Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo's CEO and founder. "It's great to see Apple making it easy for Safari users to access our anonymous search option."
DuckDuckGo recently released a retooled version that showcases its "instant answers" - information that appears above links and ads for recipes, videos, and numerous other topics. DuckDuckGo's instant answers are open-source, allowing anyone to contribute ideas and code to them.
The search engine had a strong 2013, receiving over 1 billion searches (obviously a drop in the digital bucket when compared to Google). Nevertheless, the inclusion of DuckDuckGo results could signify a shift the industry's almost complete reliance on Google.