Duck.ai Adds GPT-4o Mini with Web Search Capabilities

DuckDuckGo’s free and private Duck.ai service can now access the web when you choose the GPT-4o mini AI model.

“GPT-4o mini can now access the web, so you can get up-to-date answers directly in Duck.ai,” the DuckDuckGo announcement reads (it’s on Reddit for some reason). “As always, the same strong privacy protections apply: chats are anonymized via proxying, never used for AI model training, and no login required. All for free.”

DuckDuckGo took Duck.ai out of beta in March, offering users free, anonymous access to multiple AI chatbots on the web and integrated into its desktop web browser. In Duck.ai, GPT-4o mini will only search the web if it determines that your query requires an accurate response. But you can also manually enable web integration, or check a response, by clicking a “Search the web” (globe) icon in the chat interface.

When you use Web search with GPT-4o, Duckai will cite its sources and provide links to the original information. “We’re still actively iterating on this (for example, should we make the default answers longer?), so please let us know what you think,” the company notes.

Duck.ai web answers are similar to DuckDuckGo Search’s Assist feature, which provides AI-based answers in the search results page. But you can also start in the DuckDuckGo Search results page and then switch to Duck.ai to ask follow-up questions. The company says these two features were designed to work together, and you can switch back and forth between the chat and traditional search interfaces.

You can try this for yourself on the Duck.ai website.