Among the flurry of announcements from Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco on Monday was the revelation that a privacy-conscious search engine will now come as a built-in option in the OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 versions of Safari. The installed versions will default to Google, but DuckDuckGo is now available as a secondary choice. Previously, DuckDuckGo could only be used as an add-on.

The startup, which has which has been operating for four years now, has seen consistent growth over time—and usage has spiked after certain privacy milestones like the Edward Snowden revelations a year ago, which sent traffic soaring 300 percent.

“We are going to be a built-in option, we did know about it ahead of time, and we’re thrilled,” Gabriel Weinberg, the site’s founder, told Ars.

“It’s a big change. Apple is making it a lot easier for Safari users to use DuckDuckGo. That’s not even possible in iOS. Even with the add-on it doesn’t search seamlessly.”

Weinberg wouldn't comment on whether money had changed hands between his firm and Apple. “The terms are confidential,” he said.

Apple did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment.

As Ars reported in May 2012, DuckDuckGo works by using both its own Web crawler and data from other search engines, including Yahoo, Bing, and Blekko—but not Google. The company claims not to log IP addresses or user agents, and “no cookies are used by default." It also uses default encryption modeled after HTTPS Everywhere.

“Not really knowing about [what the other guys do], we independently made the decision that we wanted to go down this route of not storing this data,” Weinberg said in 2012.

“Search engines have a history of getting subpoenas, and Google has been more and more open to the requests that they were responding to," he said. "It seemed inevitable that search engines would get requests from law enforcement—I don’t like that idea of handing over data.”

Beyond that, the company started operating a Tor exit enclave not long after it launched, allowing traffic headed for the DuckDuckGo search engine to exit the Tor network.

“That makes it easier for people on Tor to hit our search engine and it means that we don’t store stuff and you can ensure that it exits through us. You can be end-to-end anonymous on Tor,” Weinberg added.

Previously, he told Ars that the company made about $115,000 in revenue for 2011, when traffic was only 500,000 searches per day. Now, it’s about 10 times that, and he won’t disclose any financials.

“But you can extrapolate from our traffic,” he said late Monday, noting that the company had expanded from three employees in 2012 to 20 at present.