DuckDuckGo is considerably increasing its AI-powered search capabilities while remaining deeply committed to customer privacy. The privacy-focused search engine has officially taken its AI-generated responses out of beta, expanding its sources beyond Wikipedia to incorporate information from all around the web. Additionally, DuckDuckGo is improving its AI chatbot, Duck.ai, by incorporating online search directly into its conversational interface.
DuckDuckGo's AI-assisted responses, first announced as DuskAssist in 2023, attempt to provide concise, relevant information without overwhelming consumers with superfluous facts. Unlike Google's AI Overviews, which have been criticized for being intrusive, DuckDuckGo allows users to choose how frequently they see AI-generated responses. Currently, if the AI-generated answers setting is set to "often," these responses appear only about 20% of the time; however, the business intends to increase their frequency steadily.
Duck.ai, the company's AI chatbot, is also evolving with new model options, including the GPT-4o small, o3-mini, Llama 3.3, Mistral Small 3, and Claude 3 Haiku. Notably, DuckDuckGo allows users to engage with these models while maintaining anonymity by proxying queries and prohibiting AI providers from leveraging user interactions to train models. Additionally, a new "Recent Chats" feature stores previous conversations locally on users' devices instead of DuckDuckGo's servers, reinforcing its privacy-first approach.
DuckDuckGo aims to improve its AI chatbot by introducing voice interaction for mobile users as well as image-based queries. While Duck.ai remains free, the company is considering a premium subscription for access to advanced models and larger query limits.
Unlike OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, DuckDuckGo isn't creating a separate app for its AI chatbot. Instead, the company is blending AI-assisted search and chat into a unified experience, allowing customers to smoothly transition between search and conversational AI. Users can also opt out of AI features completely, ensuring complete control over their search experience.
DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from mainstream search engines that are adopting AI-driven transformation by incorporating AI while maintaining user privacy and control.