Karl Koch | AI-assisted Answers

Private, Useful, and Optional AI: DuckDuckGo offers free access to popular AI chatbots at Duck.ai and expands AI-assisted answers on its search engine

Summary

At DuckDuckGo, we believe the best way to protect your personal information from hackers, scammers, and privacy-invasive companies is to stop it from being collected at all. We started with a search engine that doesn’t collect your search history; our flagship experience is now a browser with a suite of built-in protections that includes our search engine, ad and cookie blocking, and many more protections.

Our approach to AI extends this strategy by integrating protected AI features that offer the productivity benefits of AI without privacy risks like tracking your prompts and training on your data.

We’re not making AI features just for the sake of making AI features. They have to be actually useful in everyday use, starting with helping people get faster, high-quality answers to their questions. However, we recognize not everyone wants AI in their lives right now, and that’s OK with us. That’s why all our AI features are optional and can be turned off or tuned down.

If you’d rather start with traditional search results, simply use DuckDuckGo search as usual. AI-assisted answers – previously called DuckAssist – will automatically appear on the search results page for relevant English language queries. You can also manually trigger an AI-assisted answer on demand by pressing the “Assist” button under the search box, which appears on most queries. The answers source information from across the web, and like Duck.ai, they are completely free and private, with no sign-up required.

We’ve continuously heard from users that they want more quick, at-a-glance answers, for a broad range of topics. For years, we’ve been doing that by working on search modules to provide instant answers for things like sports scores, local business information, where to watch movies and TV shows, and much more. Now, we are finding that we can significantly expand the scale of high-quality instant answers we can show with AI as we’re now serving millions of AI-assisted answers daily. Since we’ve introduced AI-assisted answers on our search results, overall user satisfaction with our search results has improved.

When you search on DuckDuckGo, our AI-assisted answers are based on real-time web crawling, so they’re as reliable as the sources from which they are drawn. But even the most reliable sources can have errors, and mistakes can occasionally happen in the summarization process, too. That’s why we prominently display our cited sources: you can easily check them out and use your own judgment to make the final call.

We also have a number of precautions in place. Out of the countless websites we could draw from, we try to weed out ultra-low-quality sources like spammy content farms and invasive people search sites, and we try to avoid satirical sites and opinion pieces.

Press

For the press release and articles, I was responsible for all AI-related imagery

Official press release

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