This makes perfect sense in light of the growing relationship status of Apple and Google as major competitors in devices space (Android and iOS), and as such, it's a brilliant strategic move on Apple's part. DDG have made the first real inroads in search in over a decade, and they've done so quietly.

I can think of a number of widely touted alternatives which utterly failed to do so: Cuil, Bing, Blekko, A9, Teoma, and more (a DDG search shows a bunch of skeletons: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22new+search+engine%22+challenge+...). None has had the traction DDG seems to have garnered.

I see a confluence of a number of things:

• Snowden. People are now privacy conscious, and aware of the tremendous amount of information disclosed in Web searches. DDG's huge traffic spike following the Snowden disclosures is testimony to this: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html

• Google is the one to beat. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Rackspace, and others see Google as their primary competition. This creates an alignment of interests among them.

• Google has shown vulnerabilities. Failures to execute on a string of social efforts, most recently G+, as well as an increasing sense of distraction, as well as possible signs of weakness in its core search business, suggest a vulnerable underside to Google. DDG isn't big enough to cause real damage yet, but it can certainly get Google's attention.

• Democratization of search. Was a time when massive datacenter investments were necessary for search. That's both no longer the case, and DC infrastructure's getting cheaper, both of which cut away at Google's core competency and advantage.

• Google's lost its favored status among the technorati. While it's not clear who's won that crown, there's an increasing strong sense among many that Google have failed at their "don't be evil" pledge, have disappointed users, and simply don't have the chops they once demonstrated.

• Specialized search is making inroads. OpenStreetMap is taking on geosearch, Wolfram+Alpha and Knoema specialized data search, Wikipedia is a basic more-or-less-trusted repository of actual information (as opposed to random Web sites), Amazon is a product and bibliographic research library. There are places to go for information which, if you've got a specific interest, are better than Google, and they're carving off bits of the search market.

So, yes, for the first time in 15 years, search looks like it may be ripe for a bit of disruption.

Don't get me wrong: Google does some things amazingly well. Date-bounded Web searches still draw me back (I did some here to turn up a few of the more obscure search contenders from the early 2000s), the Google Books Ngram viewer is fucking awesome, Google Trends isn't bad, and a few other elements. Reliability of Google services is amazing. But there are chinks in the armor.