DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine and browser, is taking its artificial intelligence features out of beta. All users can now access AI-powered answers in search results and a separate Duck.ai chatbot for free, or choose not to use them at all.
Along with leaving beta, Duck.ai received an update with support for new large language models: GPT-4o and o3-mini from OpenAI, Llama 3.3 from Meta, Small 3 from Mistral, and Claude 3 Haiku from Anthropic. Another innovation is chat history, which is stored locally on the user's device and does not transmit any data to DuckDuckGo.
If users want to conduct a more traditional search, they will be assisted by AI answers, which can sometimes appear on their own, or users will be able to generate them themselves using the "Help" button. In addition to the answer itself, it will also be possible to see the source from which the information was taken.
In addition, users will be able to adjust how often AI-powered responses appear in DuckDuckGo's search results. There are four options in the settings - "Never", "Sometimes", "On demand" and "Frequently". Even with the latter option, AI will appear in search results about 20% of the time, but the company wants to increase this percentage in the future.
However, you can completely disable Duck.ai in the search engine settings by selecting the appropriate option. The chatbot will still be accessible via a separate link, but its icon will not appear during searches.
The company also notes that many pages and various sites are scanned for AI answers, but to increase the accuracy of the answers, some low-quality or spammy sites have been filtered out.
DuckDuckGo’s new AI answers are available in Ukraine, but for now they only apply to queries in English. The Duck.ai chatbot is available in many languages, including Ukrainian. Using the new tools is free and does not require creating an account. The company also notes that user data is protected through the use of a proxy.