DuckDuckGo Also Appears in AI Search Results
After months of beta testing, DuckDuckGo’s AI integration is being made available to everyone , and getting some updates at the same time: it’s free to use (with certain restrictions), and it adheres to DuckDuckGo’s commitment to user privacy (you don’t have to create an account to use it, and your searches aren’t tracked).
Just like Google , Bing , ChatGPT and others, you can now get AI answers to your web search queries on DuckDuckGo. They appear in a small window with an Assist label attached, but they aren’t as prominent or appear as frequently as they do on Google or Bing—DuckDuckGo is aiming for a less-is-more approach to this feature.
“We don’t build AI features just for the sake of building AI features,” writes DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg. “They should be truly useful in everyday use, starting with helping people get answers to their questions faster and better.”
With that in mind, you can customize the amount of AI visible—head over to DuckDuckGo’s settings page , and under AI Features there’s a drop-down menu that lets you choose between Never , On Demand , Sometimes , and Often . If you choose either of the last two options, the search engine will use its discretion to determine which queries can benefit from AI answers and which cannot.
The second part of DuckDuckGo’s artificial intelligence offering is the Duck.ai chatbot. You can ask the bot additional questions whenever you see an AI Assist response in search results, and you can also access it through its own web portal : Here you have access to several AI models, including the GPT-4o mini, Llama 3.3 and Claude 3 Haiku.
Chats are never saved on DuckDuckGo servers or used to train AI models, and you can erase all chats from your record by using the flame icon in the toolbar on the right. Ideally, DuckDuckGo wants you to use a combination of web search, AI Assist, and AI chat to help you get the answers you’re looking for.
If you’re wondering how all this stays free without any tracking, DuckDuckGo makes money from advertising —the ads just aren’t as targeted as Google’s because DuckDuckGo doesn’t know as much about you. The company is also exploring the idea of a paid plan for access to more advanced AI models and additional AI chats (there is already a $10/month pro-level subscription that includes a VPN and some other add-ons).
Artificial Intelligence Testing DuckDuckGo
I’ve spent some time experimenting with the new AI features, and overall they fit the overall ethos of DuckDuckGo: everything is simple, easy to use, clearly presented, and accessible without having to jump through a lot of hoops to get started with these tools.
At AI Assist level ” Sometimes “, DuckDuckGo usually makes the correct decision about whether the AI should intervene. The reason these search engines are rushing to implement AI is because queries like “how does DNA work?” or “how to fix a computer that won’t boot?” these are often better answered by a bot than a traditional list of links, especially if you can ask follow-up questions.
For more traditional queries like “Eiffel Tower” or “intermittent fasting,” DuckDuckGo takes a standard approach (the AI models have never been to France or tried dieting). If you’re searching for an AI answer and it doesn’t appear, you can click the Help button to generate one.
AI companies are often vague and dismissive when it comes to accuracy, so it’s good to see DuckDuckGo addressing this issue : AI Assist’s answers are “as reliable as the sources they come from,” while steps are taken to avoid spam or satirical sites, and user reviews add an extra layer of verification. The web sources of the AI answers are always clearly displayed, so you can click on the link to see the real websites.
All the AI answers I received were completely accurate: I ran several tests with technical questions; The AI Assist tool selected several reputable online publications for information and accurately presented it. The question is where we will end up when AI answers everything and people no longer bother posting enough information online for AI to gather, but that’s a topic for another day.
I’ve found that the Duck.ai chatbot doesn’t show up as often as I’d like to ask follow-up questions. Switching to a chatbot manually is easy enough, but then you’re faced with the knowledge limitations of these different models – they rely on historical training data rather than the latest information on the Internet. This is where more work needs to be done to integrate live web search with AI.
Overall, DuckDuckGo seems to have the right balance if you want to avoid AI overload: the AI Assist feature doesn’t always appear and doesn’t dominate search results when it does. The answers are concise and to the point, and despite a lot of competition , the privacy-focused approach is reassuring.