DuckAssist
DuckAssist is the first in a series of AI-assisted private search and browser updates. It's free (with no sign-up required!) and available to try today wherever people use DuckDuckGo.
Summary
Generative artificial intelligence is hitting the world of search and browsing in a big way. At DuckDuckGo, we’ve been trying to understand the difference between what it could do well in the future and what it can do well right now. But no matter how we decide to use this new technology, we want it to add clear value to our private search and browsing experience.
DuckAssist is a new beta Instant Answer in our search results. If you enter a question that can be answered by Wikipedia into our search box, DuckAssist may appear and use AI natural language technology to anonymously generate a brief, sourced summary of what it finds in Wikipedia — right above our regular private search results. It’s completely free and private itself, with no sign-up required, and it’s available right now. This is an AI-evolution of the work I’ve done previously in the Instant Answer space, and my focus was on leading a design evolution (shipping the eventual frontend updates also).
We designed DuckAssist to be fully integrated into DuckDuckGo Private Search, mirroring the look and feel of our traditional search results, so while the AI-generated content is new, using DuckAssist feels second nature.
DuckAssist answers questions by scanning a specific set of sources — for now that’s usually Wikipedia, and occasionally related sites like Britannica — using DuckDuckGo’s active indexing. Because we’re using natural language technology from OpenAI and Anthropic to summarise what we find in Wikipedia, these answers should be more directly responsive to the actual question in-hand than traditional search results or other Instant Answers.
