After months of beta tests, the AI integrations of Duckduckgo are Live for everyone And at the same time get some upgrades: they can be used free of charge (with certain limits) and remain in line with the commitment of Duckduckgo for the privacy of the users (they do not have to create an account to use them, and their search processes are not pursued).
Like with GooglePresent BingPresent ChattAnd others, you can now get AI response on your web search at Duckduckgo. They appear in a small box with an attached assist label, but are not as prominent and are not as often shown as on Google or Bing-and Duckduckgo strives for a less IS More approach for the function.
You can decide how much AI you see.
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“We don’t do AI functions just to create AI functions.” writes Duckduckgo CEO Gabriel Weinberg. “You actually have to be useful in everyday use, starting with people, to get people faster and high -quality answers to your questions.”
With this in mind, you can set the amount of AI you see – with head to the Duckduckgo settings pageand under AI functionsThere is a dropdown menu with which you can choose between NeverPresent Upon requestPresent SometimesAnd Often. If you select one of the latter two, the search engine uses your best judgment about which inquiries may benefit from AI answers and which not.
The second part of Duckduckgo’s Ki offer is the duck.ai chatbot. You can ask the following questions if you see an AI Assist response in the search results, and you can also access it Via your own web portal: Here you have access to several AI models, including GPT-4O Mini, Lama 3.3 and Claude 3 Haiku.
How the AI assistance box looks at the top of the results.
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The chats are never stored on Duckduckgo servers or used for training KI models. You can delete all chats with the flame icon in the toolbar on the right side from the data record. Ideally, Duckduckgo wants you to use a combination of web search, AI assistant and KI chat to get the answers you are looking for.
If you wonder how all this remains free without persecution, Duckduckgo earns his money through advertising– It is only that the ads are not as targeted as on Google, since Duckduckgo doesn’t know that much about them. The company also examines the idea of a paid plan for access to more advanced AI models and additional chats with AI (there is already one 10 dollar subscription for pro-month-pro-level subscriptionincluding a VPN and some other extras).
Test the Duckduckgo ai
I spent some time to play around with the new AI functions, and on the whole they follow the General Duckduckgo -Thos: everything is simple, uncomplicated to use, presented and accessible without having to jump through several tires to just start with these tools.
With an AI assistant level of SometimesDuckduckgo usually makes the right call about whether Ai should be involved or not. The reason why these search engines are to implement AI is that queries like “How does DNA work?” or “How do I repair a PC that doesn’t start?” are often better answered by a bot than the conventional list of left-wing in particular if you can ask follow-up questions for clarification.
You can quickly get from the search results to Duck.ai.
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Duckduckgo remains the standard approach for more traditional searches such as “Eiffel Tower” or “Intermittent Fasting” (AI models have never been in France or attempted diet). If you are looking for a KI answer and is not displayed, you can click on the Help Button to generate it.
AI companies are often vague and dismissive when it comes to accuracy. So it’s good to see Duckduckgo tackle the problem: The AI assistants are “as reliable as the sources from which they are drawn”, whereby measures are available to avoid spam or satirical websites, and the feedback from the user that adds an additional review level. The web sources for AI answers are always clearly displayed so that you can click through to display the actual websites.
All AI answers I have received seemed to be completely accurate: I carried out some tests with technical questions. The AI assistant tool selected some respected online publications to call up information and presented it exactly. The question arises where we are going when the AI answers everything, and people no longer bother to put enough information online for AI to scratch, but that’s a topic for another day.
You can ask follow-up questions within the search results.
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I found that the chatbot duck.ai did not appear as often as I would like to ask follow-up questions. It is simple enough to switch manually to the chat bot, but then they came across the knowledge of these different models on-sie torable on historical training data than on the latest information online. Further work must be done here when integrating the live website with AI.
Overall, Duckduckgo seems to have the right thing if you want to avoid AI overload: The AI Assist function does not always appear and does not dominate the search results when it is displayed. Answers are short and precise and although there are a lot of competition The data protection approach is reassuring out there.
