DuckDuckGo is Trialing New Instant Answer Feature in Search Results

DuckDuckGo announced today the launch of DuckAssist, a new AI-powered Instant Answer feature in its search results. DuckAssist’s AI-generated answers are using content from Wikipedia and other sources such as Britannica, and it integrates DuckDuckGo’s Private Search feature,

DuckAssist has been developed using natural language technology from OpenAI. It also leverages AI technology from Anthropic to summarize content coming from Wikipedia.

“For this initial trial, DuckAssist is most likely to appear in our search results when users search for questions that have straightforward answers in Wikipedia. Think questions like “what is a search engine index?” rather than more subjective questions like “what is the best search engine?,” the company explained.

According to DuckDuckGo, the fact that DuckAssist is restricted to summarizing information from Wikipedia and related sources “greatly” diminishes the risk of it starting to “hallucinate”, as is sometimes the case with ChatGPT or Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing. The Redmond giant acknowledged that its Bing chatbot could go awry after users ask it 15 or more questions, and Microsoft put some restrictions in place to avoid that going forward.

As DuckDuckGo presents itself as a search engine that respects your privacy, the company emphasized that all searches with DuckAssist are anonymous and said that OpenAI and Anthropic aren’t using these anonymous queries to train their AI models. Currently, DuckAssist is only available on the DuckDuckGo mobile apps as well as DuckDuckGo’s browser extensions.

This is the first in a series of generative AI-assisted features we hope to roll out in the coming months.,” the company said today. “If this DuckAssist trial goes well, we will roll it out to all DuckDuckGo search users in the coming weeks.”