Apple cuts some ties with Google

Oh, my! How the times have changed.

Apple and Microsoft were once at loggerheads, each trying to grab market share, but are now teaming up to combat Google.

Is it a case of the enemy of my enemy is now my friend?

Apple announced that its new operating system, Yosemite (they are now naming them after places and not cats) and iOS 8, will come with Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine on Spotlight.

This follows the move last year in which Siri, Apple’s voice-activated search, switched to Bing from Google. 

The move will help provide some distance from Google, which is Apple’s main rival in the smartphone operating system market, and where there is a high-turnover ratio to buy the latest version of the product. 

In the April comScore US Search Engine rankings, Google had 67.5 per cent market share to Microsoft’s 18.6 per cent (Yahoo was third at 10.1 per cent and is being predicted to fall below the 10 per cent threshold when the May rankings are released by Search Engine Land).

Google remains the default search engine for web searches, but users can change it to Bing or Yahoo. When iOS 8 is released, users will also be able to use DuckDuckGo, a search engine that is gaining some steam because privacy advocates like that it does not store data. 

DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo emphasizes protecting searchers’ privacy and avoiding the “filter bubble” of personalized search results. 

According to Wkipedia DuckDuckGo “distinguishes itself from other search engines by not profiling its users and by deliberately showing all users the same search results for a given search term”.

Its slogan is “the search engine that doesn’t track you”.

Launched in 2008, DuckDuckGo has yet to crack the top 500 websites in the world in terms of Internet traffic.

Its current Alexa ranking  (Alexa is a company that ranks websites based on traffic) is 625.

But that’s okay with DuckDuckGo’s founders.

Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist, said at a TechCrunch Conference in 2012: “We didn’t invest in it because we thought it would beat Google. We invested in it because there is a need for a private search engine. 

“We did it for the Internet anarchists, people that hang out on Reddit and Hacker News.”