Apple breaks further away from Google: OS X Yosemite to use Bing, DuckDuckGo for search

During last night’s WWDC 2014 keynote, Apple throughly revamped its desktop OS for a more seamless experience across devices. It also announced major changes to Spotlight, the baked-in search functionality on Macs.   The biggest change is that Apple has increased Bing integration in the new Spotlight on Mac OS X 10.10 ‘Yosemite’ . This further cuts ties between Apple and Google. Bing last year collaborated with Apple’s Siri to become the default search engine. Google was chucked out as its search engine partner.   With the new Spotlight, users can directly go to Wikipedia pages, iTunes results, Maps and other applications, without seeing the search results page on the browser. This move has completely cut Google’s presence on the OS X well at least as far as Spotlight searches are concerned. Since Spotlight now allows user to directly type for the desired keyword on the desktop without clicking on the small magnifying glass icon, Apple is effectively removing any chance of users seeing Google.   The transition will definitely take place in stages where Apple will have to take in to consideration the response they receive for such a move. For that reason Apple’s iOS is still using Google searches for all Spotlight searches, but this could change in the future. Apple may have signed a deal with Google as the default search engine on Safari, but Spotlight searches on OS X Yosemite will now go through Bing.   As for searching in Private Mode, Apple uses DuckDuckGo as the search engine. The newly introduced Private Mode, removes all traces of your browsing history and your searches will be routed through DuckDuckGo, which is a search engine focussed on privacy. This gives Apple’s Private Mode an added advantage over similar modes in Chrome or Firefox, which do not change the search engine.