Apple was planning to use DuckDuckGo search engine on Safari

The negotiations reportedly took place in parallel with Apple's discussions to acquire Bing from Microsoft between 2018 and 2020.

DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg said he had about 20 meetings and phone calls with Apple executives, including the head of Safari, in 2018 and 2019.

DuckDuckGo cannot appear on Safari because it uses search results from Bing.

Weinberg also said that Apple has integrated some of DuckDuckGo's other privacy technologies into Safari. In private mode, the web browser does not record history or store user data.

However, Giannandrea, who joined Apple as head of search in 2018, said that at the time the iPhone giant was not considering switching to DuckDuckGo.

In an email to other Apple executives in February 2019, Giannandrea said it was “probably a bad idea” to switch to DuckDuckGo for private browsing in Safari.

The reason given is that the aforementioned secure web browser relies on Bing to search for information, so it can send user information to Microsoft.

The US Department of Justice is accusing Google of paying billions of dollars to Apple and other tech companies to become the default search engine on web browsers and smartphones.

Those deals have prevented other search engines, like Bing and DuckDuckGo, from becoming rivals to Google, according to antitrust regulators.

As part of the negotiations, Apple studied Bing's search results versus Google's. The May 2021 study found that Google provided better results for the most part, except for English-language searches on desktop, where Bing's results were tied with Google's.

(According to Bloomberg)