The private search engine Duckduckgo is leaning even further towards generative AI opportunities.
Non-tracking search engines have dabbled in expanding the role of AI support in products over the past year, including launching a chatbot-style interface last fall. In a blog post Thursday, the company said the service is currently out of beta. They are also simply called duck.ai and exchanged duckduckgo ai chats with mouths for longer.
duck.ai users can immerse themselves in AI models developed by humanity, Openai, Meta and more. This will show you that the search query is being processed in a conversation style. In other words, instead of a traditional search engine list for hyperlinks, they receive AI-generated answers to searches powered by Duckduckgo, powered by the state-of-the-art AI models.
Duckduckgo points out that it has extended the model user for Duck.ai. Ai is available with recent additions such as Openai’s O3-Mini, Meta’s Llama 3.3, and Mistral’s Small 3.
Access to duck.ai is currently free, but there are daily restrictions on queries. And Duckduckgo says it will “explorate paid plans for access to higher limits and more advanced (and costly) chat models.”
At the same time, the company is dialing up its use of Genai with its traditional search engine interface (duckduckgo.com) at duck.com or duckduckgo.com. These are summaries of generated AI text that can be displayed in response to a search query, above a normal blue link.
“We now offer millions of AI assist answers every day. If you choose to frequently appear in traditional search results, you should see them across more than 20%,” the company writes.
Despite deepening Genai’s embrace, search companies are careful to keep agents for how much AI Babble gets in search results. Users can choose how often the AI-generated responses will be displayed. “Sometimes” defaults, and other options allow users to choose their own level of AI adventures.
Duckduckgo accommodates a wider market shift as Genai continues to cover web searches in general and digital businesses in particular. Search Kingpin Google scrambled to follow viral fallouts from Openai’s AI chatbot ChatGPT to quickly follow, embedding generative responses in search results from its own AI model. Recently, Google has fully experimented with groove links in favor of AI summaries using so-called AI modes.
So what can DDG bring to this competitive insanity? The company clearly feels that its central privacy pledge can move into this area. Users do not have to sign up for an account with an AI giant to access, providing the opportunity to reduce privacy risks and take advantage of key Genai tools.
“Duck.AI allows you to use models from major model providers without being tracked,” its privacy policy suggests.
“Chats have been anonymized by proxy and have never been used for AI model training,” Duckduckgo also wrote in a blog post.
So the pitch here boils to “have your genai cake and eat it secretly.” However, if you read the Full Duck.ai Privacy Policy, please note that Duckduckgo may sit on a server of a large language model manufacturer if the search queries contain their own personal data. However, since it masks IPS and other things, it is not bound by a digital ID.
Duckduckgo is another feature that allows you to easily integrate Genai into your user’s search workflow. This allows you to easily switch traditional search engine interfaces to AI chat and vice versa.
The chat button displayed under the search engine search box (see ScreenGrab below) instantly transports users to the AI chat interface. The prompt field is pre-filled with what you were searching for in Duckduckgo’s search engine, so you can easily press the submit button to get Ai-Generate’s answer to the same query.
To reverse this flow, simply tap on the same (currently highlighted) chat button and you’ll be able to return to the traditional web search interface. Therefore, this is the best world approach to tapping genai in search.
“Some people prefer to start in chat mode and jump into more traditional search results if necessary, while others prefer the opposite,” writes Duckduckgo.
“So we thought the best thing to do was provide both. We made them easy to move. We included an off switch for those who want to avoid AI completely,” he adds.
(Note: The chat button is also listed as “options,” indicating that users can also dig into their settings and turn this off if they don’t want to do a visual nudge into genai.)
Duckduckgo started with Just Wikipedia as the source of Ai-Assisted’s answers, but has since been expanded to include sources from the entire web, providing “famous source links” with more information about what underpins AI’s answers.
Another update is the “Recent Chat” feature that stores user conversations with the AI search interface “local on the device, not DuckDuckgo or other remote servers.”
Again, users can choose to disable storage if they don’t want to keep any chat records, even on their own devices.
“Duck.ai Chat is not used for AI training, either by us or by the underlying model provider,” wrote Duckduckgo. “To respond with answers and make sure all systems are working, these providers can temporarily store chats, but there is no way to remove all the metadata and personally link the chats together.”
“Add to that, we have contracts in place with all our providers to ensure that any chats saved within 30 days are completely deleted.”