Inside DuckDuckGo

• Duck Tales: How DuckDuckGo protects users from different types of scams (Episode 7)

  In this episode, Gabriel (Founder) and Thom (Security Team) discuss Scam Blocker. How it works, the types of scams it protects against, and why our ‘bad pages’ list is updated so often. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.Show notes: See the full blog post on Scam Blocker. Gabriel: Hello, welcome to DuckTales. I’m Gabriel, CEO and founder of DuckDuckGo. DuckTales is everything kind of inside DuckDuckGo. Today we have a new topic. I don’t think we have discussed much about security in our browser. I got Thom here. Thom, you want to introduce yourself?Thom: Yeah, sure. Hi, I’m Thom. I’m one of the security engineers here at DuckDuckGo. I spend most of my time kind of in and out of browser security, product security, that kind of stuff. Yeah, that’s the kind of stuff I love.Gabriel: Sweet. And I think we’re here today to talk about our Scam Blocker. If you follow our blog, we actually had a pretty big article about this when it launched a few months ago. And so you can always check that out too, but we’re going to tell you all about it here and some of the inside info on how it came together. Yeah, Thom, you want to just explain generally what it is? What is Scam Blocker exactly?Thom: Yeah, sure. So I guess Scam Blocker is what we call our in-browser phishing and scam protection. It kind of runs in the background and checks websites as you visit them all locally in the browser. And we kind of have a pretty big data set here that we get from Netcraft. So we can protect against all sorts of scams — this isn’t your standard phishing protection. We try and protect against cloned e-commerce sites, fake crypto exchanges, scareware like fake virus pages, and advertising of fake products and stuff. So we have quite a lot that we’re trying to protect against, but this feature as a whole is that warning page that you get when you’re about to visit something that could be scammy or phishing related.Gabriel: So let’s talk about that distinction a little bit. I guess backing up a little, how did this come together? How did we end up building this and then building it kind of differently than other companies?Thom: Yeah, so it came from a long way back. Originally, we had this idea that we wanted to improve our tracking protection and all of this stuff — trying to make our browsers as safe as possible for our users. We knew that we wanted to do something in this space, but the challenge was that it’s quite easy to build a feature like this where it ends up looking like you need to check people’s browsing activity — and we can’t do that from a privacy perspective. So we knew that we had to do this in a privacy-preserving way, and we didn’t like the idea of sending any data to Google or Microsoft because they pretty much own this space in terms of browser protections. We weren’t comfortable with that, so that kind of led us down the path of building it ourselves.Gabriel: Interesting. So like at a high level, our browser has a privacy protection list instead of blocking that we built ourselves because we didn’t believe anyone else was doing it up to the standard that we think it should be. But that’s all kind of behind the scenes on pages that you visit, assuming that was a page you actually wanted to visit. Privacy and security overlap, but as I understand it, some pages you visit are actually bad for you — not because there’s hidden trackers, but because the page itself has malware or scams. Those are the pages we wanted to cover. And in doing that, you need to have a list of bad pages.Thom: Yeah.Gabriel: Everyone else seems to be using Google or Microsoft, and all the other browsers are just kind of riding on Google Safe Browsing. But we wanted to go somewhere different. So we found this vendor Netcraft, who maintains a big list, and it turns out they have an even bigger list than Google’s because they cover these other categories, right?Thom: Yeah, exactly.Gabriel: Like some of these scam categories that you mentioned are not traditional malware phishing. They’re theoretically legitimate businesses that are scamming you. So for whatever reason, they’re not on Google’s list. Is that kind of how to think about it?Thom: Yeah. That’s a good way of saying it. Some of these are quite unique. One of the interesting cases I like to refer to is that sometimes even a blog post could be a scam. If this is a blog post advertising a fake product that’s going to steal your money, that’s a problem. A lot of these scam sites start somewhere trusted, like a Medium article or GitHub page, and then send you down fishy paths until you end up somewhere meant to steal your money. That’s the kind of thing we’re looking at here with Netcraft. We get data that lets us look at the source of it rather than waiting for you to click through multiple times to get there.Gabriel: So we license this data set from Netcraft who’s aggregating all of these scams from different signals. And then what do we do with it exactly? How does it work to be embedded in the browser?Thom: Basically, we pull this data — it’s constantly evolving, which is one of the challenges. We have to update it pretty much every five minutes on the backend. We pull it, process it, filter out some of the lower-risk things, and then compress it.Gabriel: Five minutes is so quick. So it’s really happening in real time. I didn’t realize we were doing it that real time.Thom: Yeah, it’s rapid. If you take a random phishing link now and look again in five minutes, chances are it’s gone.Gabriel: And that’s because all these people are reporting these things, right? It’s an arms race — things get blocked quick, they switch domains, and all sorts of crazy stuff.Thom: Exactly. It’s this constant cat-and-mouse game.Gabriel: Cool. Sorry to interrupt. Every five minutes, we’re updating this list on our backend.Thom: Yeah, and then we compress this into a small format. Our browsers pull this data every 10 to 20 minutes depending on platform. That’s how the update mechanism works.Gabriel: Got it. So once it’s sitting in the browser, the browser checks against the list. If you’re going somewhere that’s on the list, that’s when you see the warning page. Are we similar to others where you get a big warning page but can accept the risk? And do all these warning pages look the same or are there different types?Thom: Yeah, pretty much the same. You get a warning page explaining the case. We have three types of warning pages — they vary slightly in iconography and copy. They’re for malware, phishing, and scam. Malware means you might download something malicious, phishing is about credentials or credit cards, and scam is broader — like a dodgy e-commerce site.Gabriel: Got it. So any surprises in building this or challenges that arose getting it live to production?Thom: Yeah, a few. The first one is that we have four browsers — four different platforms. The core part of the feature is constantly updating, but the other challenge is intercepting navigation requests. Every browser does this differently. So we had to map out how each does it and figure out ways to do it efficiently. We pride ourselves on our browsers being quick — we don’t want to affect load times. So we had to make sure the check runs quickly, just before a page loads. There’s a lot to consider. That was one of the biggest challenges.Gabriel: Yeah, that makes sense. It basically seems like one project, but it’s four big projects — MacOS, Windows, Android, and iOS. Cool. So how has it gone? Any good response? I know we put out a blog post and got some press when it launched. It seemed positive from my view, but from your point of view, what did you think?Thom: I think we had good positive feedback. One unique thing about this feature is that it’s in the background — its success hinges on people not really seeing it. If loads of people are seeing the error page, then we’ve probably done something wrong. But overall, it’s gone well.Gabriel: Yeah, that’s a good point. It’s like our other privacy protections — always on, not breaking sites, contributing to peace of mind. It’s protection that’s there, not in your face.Thom: Precisely. People who’ve come across it said it works well and gives them peace of mind.Gabriel: Cool. So it sounds like it kind of went off without a hitch. Is there anything left to do now? Are we kind of in maintenance mode with it?Thom: Yeah, pretty much in maintenance mode. We have about three or four people monitoring metrics. But we’re exploring ways to enhance the data, maybe adding new or better data sets. We might tailor data sets by platform — for example, malware is more prevalent on Windows, scams more on mobile. I’ve also been reading about using small language models fine-tuned to detect scammy websites locally. It’s promising research — local-only, privacy-preserving — though I don’t see it in the browser anytime soon.Gabriel: That sounds fun. A good hack day project — and who knows, lots of those end up in the product. I definitely think we should ship local models or get access to local ones on the device. The problem’s been that either local models aren’t very good or the downloadable ones are too big, like three gigs. But I think it’s coming. I think there’ll be a future where we have local models in the browser, shipped by default or opt-in, maybe with extra protection. That would be an interesting incentive to download a local model if it gives extra security protection.Thom: Yeah, exactly — extra security protections. I’d love that.Gabriel: All right. Well, we’ll end here. Thanks, Thom, for coming on. Hope everyone enjoyed hearing about security, and maybe when you launch something new, come back and we’ll talk about it again. All right, bye everybody.Thom: That was great. Thanks a lot, Gabriel. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com

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• Duck Tales: The internet’s privacy problem, and how DuckDuckGo is solving it (Episode 6)

  In this episode, Cristina (SVP, Marketing) and Peter (Director, Product) discuss digital fingerprinting, privacy washing, and how hidden trackers appear in the majority of popular websites. Plus, the steps you can take to protect yourself online. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.CristinaHi, and welcome to DuckTales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help provide privacy tools for everyone.In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, approach to AI, or how we operate as a company. Today, we’re going to chat about the online privacy problem and DuckDuckGo’s web protections. I’m Cristina. I’m on the marketing team. And today, I’ll be interviewing Peter. Peter, would you like to introduce yourself, maybe what team you’re on and where you spend a lot of your time? ⁓Peter Absolutely.Hi, Cristina. I’m Peter. I’m on the product team at DuckDuckGo, which I typically work on our browsers and our privacy protection. So happy and excited to talk about the mystifying world of online tracking and privacy today.CristinaAwesome, likewise, well let’s jump in. So I think a lot of people would be surprised to hear just how much information about them is being tracked online. Some seemingly irrelevant to what they’re doing and some pretty creepy in how detailed it is and how all the dots are being connected. Can you give some examples of the pervasiveness of this tracking?Peter Absolutely. know, anyone I talk to about online privacy, the first thing they’ll tell me, and I’m sure you’ve heard the same, is microphones must be listening to them. ⁓ Yeah, everyone can give an example of a conversation in their household where not too long thereafter, they’re seeing advertisements, creepy advertisements, following them around online based on, you know, what it is they were talking about. ⁓ And the reality is the amount of surveillance that happensis like microphones are listening to you everywhere, but the methods are not actually microphones. The methods are actual trackers on websites, on search engines and browsers and apps, which we’ll talk about that are always collecting information about you. ⁓ So just to break those down a little bit, most people, if you think about someone in their daily life, they’re going to go do a search online, whether it’s on their smartphone or on their computer.The search engine that most people use is, of course, Google, most dominant search engine in the world. They collect basically anything and everything about you. ⁓ And so that search engine is one source of this data collection. And then ⁓ the browser you use to actually do those searches, often owned by some of the same companies like Google, ⁓ like Google Chrome specifically, these browsers also directlycollect information about you. So if you’re not using a private search or a private browser, a lot of information is directly collected about you. But then, of course, after you do a search and you get onto a website, the websites themselves have trackers embedded in them. And specifically, we’ve done actually a lot of analysis on this. 85 % of the top websites on the web have Google trackers included in them, and about 36 % haveMeta or Facebook trackers overall. And these trackers are pieces of code that run on the websites that send information about you, what you’re doing on the site, what products you’re looking at, what’s in your shopping cart, and so on to companies that are not the owners of the websites. The same is true of your mobile apps. So just as it happens, the surveillance on websites, it happens in your mobile apps. ⁓ In fact, 96 % of the popular top free AndroidApps send data to third-party companies. And of those, 87 % send data to Google, 68 % send data to Guest It, Meta, and Facebook. Top two trackers overall. And then, of course, there’s other sources too. When you use emails, emails contain trackers. When you open them, little code fires. It tells the email sender when you open their email, where you were when they opened the email. And then there’s a lot of other scenarios too. Like if you go to the store,What do they ask you when you make a purchase at the store? Can we have your email address? And they say, oh, it’s for a loyalty program. You can get points or whatever it is. But the reality is they’re actually usually taking that email address and then directly uploading it to Facebook, to Instagram, so that they can buy advertisements targeting you later. And so you combine all this. And you have this pervasive tracking and then targeting that’s happening.that makes it feel like ultimately there must be microphones listening to you, but it’s just happening throughout your day overall.CristinaIt’s pretty chilling that I could be on almost any site or Android app or reading email or at the mall buying a new shirt and companies like Google are tracking me. So what type of information are they collecting?Peter So they’re typically after two sets of things. And when I say they, I use Google and Meta, Facebook as examples, but there’s thousands of other ad tech companies that are often in the mix trying to collect something about you as well. ⁓ They’re looking first for an identifier. So they want something that’s gonna be able to tie what you’re doing to an identity so they know who it is, or even if they might not know who exactly it is, they wanna know it’s the same person. So of course, email address could be an identifier, your name could be an identifier, phone number could be an identifier. Those are the obvious ones that they would want. And by the way, this is why so many websites try to get you to log in on those websites, often with your Google login, because then they can tie all this, whatever you’re doing on that website to your identity. And then of course, I think most people have heard of cookies, and seen cookie banners come up when they visit websites.Cookies are another form of identifier, might not be your name or your email address, but it is a unique code. And so that when these trackers that are across all these websites see the same cookie identifiers across those websites, they all, this is the same person. And so whatever you did on this site, we can link it to whatever you did on this other site. And then there’s a couple other identifiers such as ⁓ digital fingerprints, which really use information about your device, like your screen resolution and your battery, literally the state of your headphone jack on your smartphones, they piece this together into a digital fingerprint that is unique. And so if they see the same set of attributes about your device on a different website or different app, again, they can infer this is the same person overall. So that’s the first thing they want, identifiers. And then the second thing they want is something about you, behavior, interests, actions. ⁓ And so it might be as high level as Cristina’s into snowboarding. ⁓But it could be as low level as the specific things that you had in your shopping cart, what you purchased in real life in Home Depot last week. ⁓ Whatever it is, they basically want to collect it, put it together into a behavioral profile that they can then turn around to advertisers and offer very hyper-targeting to these individuals overall. And just to give you a sort of creepy example, we’ve done a lot of studies on this with websites and apps.And we looked at health websites and health applications, ones where you may look up health conditions or prescription drugs. And we literally observe these trackers included in these apps or websites sending information about your health conditions, your sexual orientation, and even prescription drug information to third-party companies overall, things that people would be absolutely shocked to hear overall.CristinaThat’s definitely not information I want shared without my permission. ⁓ And while historically I might have thought something like, ⁓ battery life or headphone jacks, whatever, don’t care, when you start piecing it together to make this fingerprint like you’re talking about, yeah, it gets super scary. You know, I’ve heard some people say, ugh, it’s impossible to do anything when it comes to these giant companies and all these clever ways they’re collecting information. Anything I could do would just be a drop in the ocean. How is DuckDuckGo thinking about a user-led approach to solving the privacy problem?Peter DuckDuckGo, obviously, most people know us through our private search engine. And of course, our private search doesn’t collect information about users. That’s what sets it apart. And even our advertisements themselves on DuckDuckGo search are just based on what you’re searching for. But ⁓ we realized that protecting people in their searches is not enough. We needed to protect people’s privacy more broadly. And so that’s why DuckDuckGo introduced you some years back. ⁓browsers as well. And so you could use our search and our browser to more broadly protect you. ⁓ Let me share my screen a little bit here just to show you a sort of comparison we put together. So we put together a comparison for people. I won’t go over all the details. feel free to take a look at this later, duckduckgo.com slash compare dash privacy. But ⁓ basically, when you’re trying to protectCristinaThat’d be great.Peter privacy broadly through all these threats I step through. You really need protections for each one of those threats and the methods of data collection. And so that’s what we try to incorporate into our browser overall. And so you’ll see our browser has a bunch of different web tracking protections. We block these third party trackers that are on the websites. We block link trackings, a little codes embedded in the links you click on that can reveal information about you.We block the cookies, the third party cookies that are used to track you and a lot more. can kind of see, you know, going down this list, all this sort of comprehensive protections we have in addition to, of course, the private search that I mentioned. And you can see that comparison, you know, relative to Chrome here. ⁓ Most people in the world from a browser perspective are using Chrome. And you can see out of the box, Chrome does not protect you fromreally any of these threats. ⁓ And a lot of these companies that own browsers like Chrome will say, well, we offer user choice and you can configure things to protect your data how you want. And the reality is most people will not understand the details of all these tracking methods and they won’t know how to go into the settings in Chrome and configure it, know, granularly to stop some of these things. And many of these things you can’t actually prevent using Chrome settings as well.And so the DuckDuckGo browser, we try to make it very comprehensive and it really gives you a broad set of protections in a bunch of scenarios. And that extends to even email and on Android protecting you in other apps, ⁓ when you’re using other apps on your device with their app tracking protection. So feel free to take a look at this, scroll through it and compare whatever browser you currently use to what DuckDuckGo offers overall.CristinaThat’s a great chart. Thank you for sharing that. ⁓ It also helps unpack some of ⁓ the privacy washing that’s been happening. Do you want to touch on that briefly?Peter Absolutely. So we often describe how other browsers say, we offer privacy, we’re private, or we offer user choice. And we describe that as privacy washing, in that they’re making you think that they are private. But in fact, they’re really not offering you a comprehensive suite of protections that is necessary to stop all the data collection in these different circumstances overall. So don’t be fooled by a lot of the you know, sort of fancy advertisements you see, you know, do take, go do your research, use a comparison chart like ours. We tried to really dig in on the details. If you want to dig in granularly and see exactly how it works on, you know, Windows and Mac, and we actually offer learn more links here. You can click through into our help pages ⁓ and we offer, you know, full explanations on how it all works in detail for those that are interested.CristinaAwesome. Yeah, it certainly seems like there’s a lot of intentional conflation of security and privacy and every company, even beyond browsers, want to talk about how private they are, even the most are far from it. ⁓ Maybe you want to stop sharing your screen and then can you leave us with some parting thoughts for those people who still may not be convinced, who still may say, isn’t needed because I have nothing to hide. Why else should they care?Peter Yeah, actually, won’t stop sharing the screen because I’ll show something to illustrate this a little bit further. So of course, stopping the data collection itself will lead to all kinds of benefits for you. No creepy ads following you around online. But there’s a lot of other benefits that come along with these privacy protections. Just to illustrate one of those, I think I’ll use a particular website here, but it’s notCristinaOkay, great.Peter you know, anything out of the ordinary, you’ve all seen these cookie banners that come up on websites all the time. Some of them are huge like this. They take up most of the page before you can even use the website. You have to read all this legalese and then make a decision about cookie usage. Most people don’t understand any of these details and they will click off of this as soon as possible. But the reality is if you click, yes, I accept, what you’re typically doing is givingthe authorization for these cookies, these identifiers I mentioned earlier to be used to track you and store information about you ⁓ overall. And this screen is an annoyance. think everyone’s experienced this on every website you go to. DuckDuckGo out of the box offers something called ⁓ Cookie Pop-Up Protection. I turned it off here for the purpose of illustrating that cookie banner, but I’ll turn it on so you can see, and this is the default that you’ll get in DuckDuckGo so you can see this benefit.Now, next time you go to this website or in general, when you visit sites like this, Dite.go, you can see it came up and then these cookies managed at the top. We are automatically seeing that this cookie banner came up and selecting the most private option for you and then dismissing it. And so it’s a huge benefit in terms of annoyance reduction online. And you’ll see as a result, there are no tracking requests anymore found on this page. ⁓because we picked the most private option for users overall. That plus just a lack of creepy ads you’ll see online, you’ll see a lot fewer ads. And then the last thing I’ll say, because AI is such a hot topic, many people are starting to use AI tools. ⁓ These privacy issues I’m talking about are just going to get worse in the world of AI.because a lot of the AI companies have really stated their intention to collect a lot about the user so that they can use that information to tailor these AI results and responses in AI chat and so forth. So it’s important that you really use products like DuckDuckGo search, browser, protected privacy, and Duck.AI is our foray into the AI world that will help protect your privacy in AI as people start to use these new tools.CristinaThanks for that additional detail. think most folks, regardless of their views on AI, can agree that privacy will probably get worse with it. And yeah, I love that you shared the cookie pop-up example. I think that’s a really good example of good intentions, terrible execution. And if I never saw one of those again, I’d be a very happy person. Well, I hope folks are convinced enough to go learn more.Peter Absolutely, you and me both.Cristinato try out DuckDuckGo. Peter, it was lovely chatting with you. Thank you so much for your time today.Peter Lovely chatting with you and hopefully we didn’t scare too many people right before Halloween with this Hanwan world of trackers.CristinaExactly. Well, thanks to everyone who took the time to listen to our conversation. We have many more episodes planned on a wide variety of topics, so stay tuned for more. See you later!Peter Thank you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com

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• Duck Tales: More ways to customize DuckDuckGo — now you can exclude certain websites from search results (episode 5)

  In this episode, Gabriel (Founder) and Greg (Product, Search) discuss how we’re giving users even more ways to customize their search experience with site exclusions — an easy way to remove certain websites from appearing in search results.Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.Gabriel:Hello again, welcome to DuckTales, our inside DuckDuckGo podcast video thing. I don’t know what you call us exactly. Today I have Greg with us. Greg, you want to introduce yourself?Greg:Hello, ⁓ I’m Greg Fiorentino. ⁓ I ⁓ work on the product team here at DuckDuckGo. I’ve been here almost seven years, which is wild, time flies, ⁓ but yeah.Gabriel:That is a long time. And you’re underselling yourself a little bit. Yes, you’re on product team, but for the last while and for the future, you’re running our search engine, correct?Greg:Yeah, that’s right. Search retention, ⁓ I have worked across local search, the search ads, ⁓ lots of different things. ⁓Gabriel:Sweet, and today we are talking about a relatively new search feature that we launched that people are liking. And you know what, I won’t even introduce it. I’ll leave you to share your screen and let’s walk through it.Greg:Sure. So ⁓ we now ⁓ have the ability to, ⁓ for users to exclude ⁓ individual domains ⁓ from their search results. So I’ll kind of show real quick what this looks like. Let’s say I’m doing a, I’m writing some code and I want to do a technical search. I want to figure out how to do an array of strings in TypeScript.Gabriel:Those who don’t know TypeScript is a programming language. Yes, right. JavaScript-ish.Greg:Programming language, yeah, yeah, yeah. Super set of JavaScript. So let’s say I want to know how to do this and I get a bunch of search results and I see some here. And some of these are sites I know and like, and maybe some of them I want to exclude. I don’t want to throw too much shade, but let me just pick one and kind of go. So let’s say I don’t want to get results from W3 schools.Gabriel:I’ve seen so many comments about people wanting to get rid of W3Skulls, not to throw shade. I’ve used W3Skulls before and I don’t find it that bad, but there’s a lot of people who seem to not like it who would probably want to remove it, so.Greg:Yeah I’ve used it too. Yeah. Yeah, and I would say, mean, this feature, I think, is particularly good for use cases like this, where there’s a site that maybe comes up a lot, and for whatever reason, a user has kind of a disposition that they just don’t want to see that site. We have other ways to accomplish this. ⁓ You can just put minus site and then the domain in your query.Gabriel:So you could do that for a long time, right? This minus sign thing. But this menu, which people don’t even maybe realize exists a lot of people, is relatively new, like maybe a year ago or something like that.Greg:Yeah, we added this menu a little over a year ago to all organics, and organics being these text results. And at first, And in fact, I can just show if I click this redo search without this site, you’ll see it adds that syntax right to the query ⁓ and excludes it from the results. ⁓ So we’ve had that since we first launched this menu about a year ago. ⁓ And it works pretty well. We got some good feedback about that when we first launched it. ⁓ We also added that menu to give us the ability to have users flag specific results ⁓ for a variety of reasons. So users can tell us about individual results that they don’t like if they click Share Feedback about this site. ⁓ But the new feature is that you can now choose to block this site from all results. So you don’t have to add that syntax to the query every time you want to remove it. So if I do that, you get this little message saying that it’s been blocked successfully. And I’m not sure if my screen is showing it, but you get a message at the top that tells you that you have one result hidden from a site that you’ve blocked. And you can also go into your settings and you can see the sites that you’ve blocked and manage them.Gabriel:Sweet and reception so far. don’t think, cause I think it was new. I don’t think we’ve done a lot of announcements of this yet. ⁓ by the curious, like, is it starting to get usage? Like that kind of thing.Greg:Yeah, we’re seeing a relatively ⁓ growing number of searches per day that use this block in some form. The vast majority are only blocking a single site. ⁓ We’ve talked about it little bit in a couple of places ⁓ on social and also just have users write in through our usual feedback channels to tell us about it. ⁓ You know, I think the theme here is that... We just are giving users more choice ⁓ in how their search results work. They can ⁓ do some level of customization to their own needs. ⁓ And so this is kind of another feature that helps to accomplish that. And I think that’s generally appreciated. There are some limitations also to this that we’ve heard about too, and we’re thinking about how to make it even better. But yes, growing usage and some positive results. reaction so far.Gabriel:Sweet, yeah, I agree. We’ve been doing customization for a long time. mean, like this, the settings screen you’re just showing shows how many settings we actually support in terms of customization, which is a lot. And it reminds me of the AI filter that we also recently launched to remove ⁓ some AI image search results. ⁓ This, like you said, it’s a little different because it’s more like... specific domains that are coming up a lot that you really don’t like. ⁓ But yeah, I’m curious, like, given the feedback so far, and I remember now seeing several subreddit people finding it and posting positive things about it, subreddit posts. But yeah, like, where are we thinking of taking this in the future? Or like, are there other features, kind of like the AI one that kind of merges or circles around this same idea of like removing things?Greg:Yeah, there are a couple of things. mean, you know, as a starting point, we had a limitation of five domains, up to five domains that users could do. You know, part of that was based on this hypothesis that most users really would only want to block one or two, which I think is what we’re seeing. We have had people ask us for more. We’re exploring how we would do that. You know, these things are always...Gabriel:In pause of that, partly a couple follow-up questions. One is, it’s client-side now, right? Like, you’re, you block the domains, you’re actually getting the results back, but then your client is removing them based on your settings.Greg:That’s correct, yeah, the result is there, it’s just not shown.Gabriel:Got it. And the second thing is like, I think we were also talking about like, if you remove too many, that’s probably the way I put the message up. Like you may actually want them sometimes when they’re really relevant. And then if you remove tons of domains and then you remove actually good stuff sometimes, then you’re going to think our search results are terrible because you actually removed stuff that was important that one time.Greg:That’s right. One of the things we tested when we built this was how often do we see just a page of all the same domain, such that if a user removed that domain, they would get a no results page and think that the search engine was broken. ⁓Gabriel:You’re like, no results that time, yeah.Greg:It’s not zero, right? If I, for example, typed in, you know, I wanna see something on W3 schools from that example from a minute ago and got all results from there, it would just be an empty page. So we wanna be able to say, hey, you’ve made some customization here that’s hiding some results from you and you have the option then to see them.Gabriel:But nevertheless, we’re, I we set five initially, but we’re thinking about increasing it at least a little bit.Greg:That’s right. They’re also, ⁓ right now they only apply to those organic texts. link results. We’re looking at expanding that to other kinds of content on the page that it should also apply to. ⁓ And there’s potentially overlap with the AI image feature that you talked about. ⁓ Certainly, there’s some use cases around ⁓ news or videos or other kinds of content that users might want to have a little bit more customization around.Gabriel:And it’s also, I it’s also possible that, you know, similar to the AI image list, we could use a kind of organic AI list to have a different feature, but a similar kind of toggle to like remove AI organics or something like that.Greg:Yeah, that’s definitely something we’re looking at too. I mean, it’s a similar kind of ⁓ challenge and part of the challenge there is just that there are so many new sites kind of popping up every day. ⁓ And so this feature is less geared around that. I would put that in more of the sort of... ⁓ spam category, results that are ⁓ things that maybe very, very rarely get clicked ⁓ on, very fresh, ⁓ but not a ton of original content. ⁓ There are potentially other things that we wanna add on top of this feature to kind of supplement that and help users not have so many of those showing up in their results too.Gabriel:I guess related to that, I you showed the menu where we have, and you could submit feedback. think we’ve also, I mean, you could submit feedback there that it’s a spam site. I think we might’ve also recently added, you could submit that it’s an AI spam site, but we actually use that information. And to the extent that we ultimately make a feature that might toggle off some of that, like we would use that feedback. So if you’re out there and you wanna submit us feedback, that’s a good way to do it for like sites that you’re finding you don’t. are completely not relevant,Greg:Yeah, that’s exactly right. Maybe I’ll just show that real quick because...Gabriel:Yeah, that’s good. I mean, we want more feedback on this particular variety.Greg:We do. mean, the more feedback we get about it, the better. ⁓ So say I come in here and go share feedback about this site. ⁓ You can select that a site ⁓ is AI generated. You can sort of tell us anything you might want to tell us about that, or you can just send that and it will flag it for us to review. we obviously, we get a bunch of these every day now. ⁓ We only added this AI generated option a couple of weeks ago even, we’ve had the spam option, which we’ve used ⁓ for a while. ⁓ But we’re sort of looking at these, ⁓ we’re investing in other ways to help us kind of verify that something is in fact AI generated. ⁓ And it’s a pretty new ⁓ space and I think we’re sort of learning what works well for that. again, if you’re out there and you want to tell us about these, ⁓ we are kind of building up our capabilities around this and making use of that feedback directly.Gabriel:Sweet. Great. Anything I missed about this feature or you didn’t tell us that you want to share?Greg:⁓ I think that just kind of on the topic of choice and customization, we put a decent amount of thought into ⁓ how we make it clear to users that ⁓ this feature is in effect, that you’ve blocked a site, ⁓ how you kind of manage the list of blocked sites once you... ⁓ you know, once you’ve done that. I think, you know, we’d love to hear other feedback about how well that’s working, how clear that is. ⁓ You know, we kind of build these things and put them out there. We test them a lot. But, you know, as we add more functionality to this, you know, we’re always looking for... ⁓ for feedback about how well it works and ways to make it better. So, you know, that’s one particular piece that to me was really important when we built it was, you know, we don’t want to create a feature kind of thinking it’s useful and then, you know, make something that is... inadvertently creating confusion or making it harder for users to find what they’re looking for. So that’s something we’re kind of on the lookout for as we try to improve it.Gabriel:That’s great. It reminds me of one last thing, which I think we should just basically have a future episode about. just to tease out, I’m sure we’re going to get this point of feedback in the next, this is prediction, in the next month from our subreddit. I set these sites that I don’t want to see, and then I cleared all my settings, and now I have to redo them. ⁓ Unfortunately, outside of our browser, we don’t really have a lot of control with that because settings... We don’t have accounts and settings are getting stored in browser storage. And if you clear all the browser storage for an up to go, then this goes away. However, we are working on ⁓ syncing your search settings to your browser settings. So if you’re using our browser, ⁓ we won’t lose your search settings. And that is a thing that people have been asking for for literally a decade. And so I’m very excited about working on it. Not that we’re done with it yet, but like ⁓ maybe when we first... have that working, could come back and do another episode with somebody.Greg:Yeah, I think it would be great to showcase that. we’ve tried a number of ⁓ technical solutions to try to reduce the ⁓ accidental clearing of settings. ⁓ And yeah, we have less control outside of our browsers. But even there, think we’ve made some strides. ⁓ Within our browsers, there’s a lot more we can do ⁓ and then ways to allow users to sync. ⁓ So we could definitely showcase that.Gabriel:Cool. Well, thank you, Greg, for coming on to DuckTales and thank you everybody for listening. And until next time.Greg:Thanks, Gabriel. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com

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• Duck Tales: Delight at DuckDuckGo — and why we’ve created 350+ versions of our mascot (Dax the Duck) (Episode 4)

  In this episode, Gabriel (founder) and Beah (VP, Product) discuss functional and non-functional product delight, how we’ve created 350+ versions of our mascot (and counting), and why AI is so bad at adding mustaches to Ducks. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.GabrielHello again, welcome to Duck Tales. ⁓ I think this is gonna be episode four. Hopefully it’s getting better. Today I am not interviewing Beah. Beah’s actually gonna interview me about a feature that’s fun that I think you’ll enjoy. But Beah, you wanna introduce yourself?BeahSure. I’m Beah. I’m on the product team here at DuckDuckGo. Been here about six years. So seen a lot of things that have happened in recent DuckDuckGo product history. I, Delight is a favorite topic, a theme of mine. So I’m glad to be doing this conversation.GabrielYes, indeed. Yes, speaking of the light, my favorite dog is behind you. Because I don’t have a dog. Well, I don’t have a dog, and it’s the dog I interact with most. Friday.BeahHe’s your favorite. Certainly the one that attacks you the most, playfully attacks you the most. Yeah. Yes, that’s that’s Friday, everyone. He is usually not so low energy as he looks right now.GabrielThat’s true. Yeah. The bar might be low. But yes, so I forgot to say DuckTales is obviously inside DuckDuckGo, behind the scenes kind of information about things we’re doing and how the company works and features we’re building and all that kind of stuff. ⁓ And as you noted, we have a delightful feature ⁓ that we’d like to talk about today. But I worked on it, it was actually part of Hack Days. We had a previous episode, it was also a feature came out of Hack Days. But yeah, shoot some questions at me and I will respond.BeahSure. Tell us the origin, Gabriel. How did you come to decide to work on this?GabrielYes, so what are we talking about? First of all, if you ⁓ search some special words, often characters like Spider-Man, Batman kind of thing, ⁓ the logo, our logo, Dax the Duck for those people don’t know, will change and he will be costumed ⁓ in that character ⁓ in the little logo on the search engine. We actually did this a long time ago. So we used to do like our version of Google doodles or whatever on the homepage. Maybe like literally 15 years ago at this point, ⁓ up until maybe 2012 ish. ⁓ We stopped doing it because it was hard to do. It took a lot of time to make the, make the especially logos. It also confused a lot of people because we put it up in like kind of random situations, like someone may have died or hollowed something and people who didn’t know about that person or holiday were just like what what what is going on with this but a lot of people really liked it and especially liked just the idea and the fun I would call delight as we’re gonna get to the the changing logo and that just the funness of dressing up a character ⁓ and I also am in that category so I’ve been wanting to bring this back for like 10 years but had no great way to do it⁓ And then enter, enter AI. I thought that AI could be useful ⁓ making these specialty logos in some way. ⁓ When I first tried it, it was not, and I tried different versions of image models. But then finally I was hack days a few months ago, got it to work. ⁓ And so now we’ve been making them.BeahOkay. Okay.GabrielOne of suggestions of the community and team members and putting them up as Easter eggs. Yeah.BeahDo you want to just say what hack days is for anybody who doesn’t know.GabrielYeah, so Hack Days is every quarter, anyone who wants to participate in the company, and we’re about 300 people at this point, maybe 350 or something, can get together and create work on anything they want, really. It often is like features, ideas, and maybe designer, engineer, new, don’t have to be a product person, but they don’t have to be engineering a product, they can just join and collaborate, come up with something exciting. It could be like little things like fixing bugs or things in our product, but often like things people are really excited about like this for me. I actually tried it in two different ways. I wanted to do this idea, but I also wanted to get back into programming and try out all the AI programming tools. So in doing this, I actually used AI for the first time, like end to end to like write the code.BeahOkay. Okay. ⁓what AI tools do you use?GabrielI used Curser to kind of manage the creation of the tool. And then I used ⁓ the ChatGPT Create Image API to really be the generation of this. I can share my screen a little bit and we can look atBeahYeah, show us some.GabrielYeah, let me do that. Sharing screen, window. Okay. Let me actually. this way. Okay, can you see this? Sweet. Okay, so ⁓ this is one of my favorites. So if you search the dude, which is a character from The Big Lebowski, I move this so I can see you still. ⁓ And you put your mouse over, you can see Dax is now decked out in the sweater and sunglasses. And I put this in a new tab so you can see it ⁓ zoomed in a bit. ⁓BeahOkay. Okay.GabrielSo this is kind of the idea. A few of my other favorite ones so you can get the ideas. If you search Hydra, ⁓ you get this,Gabrielyou know, and multi-dex, if you will. Moona Nights, for those who don’t know, that’s an Aqua Teen Hunger Force character. ⁓BeahJust for the record. I did not know that.GabrielAre you serious you know or you didn’t know it? Okay, you might have noticed there’s a big Moon poster in our office. You walk through it because we go there sometimes. And the final one I throw up is the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. I just like the idea that Dax is a duck, but you can also make this work with like a mixture of animals, which is fun. Yeah, okay. So a couple of things I want to point out.BeahHmm. Yeah. did you decide how to like, how did you figure out who to do this for, what characters to do this for?GabrielYes, best part about this is, I didn’t for the most part. I put this up and we came up with some guidelines internally, like we’re not doing alive people, that kind of thing, mainly characters. And I just asked ⁓ for suggestions internally. Once I had like initial set, I posted it and I’ve been getting internal suggestions from the get-go. So at this point, I just go ⁓ every few weeks.And there’s magically more suggestions from our team members in there. And I haven’t heard of, would say, 60 % of them. And I will just kind of make them happen. The tool that does that, just to show you this a little bit, which is kind of fun, is, so this is an internal tool. I did this for suggestions that are real suggestions right now. So this is like internal stuff. These might come. I have no idea what Podman is, by the way. I just said this this morning.GabrielI literally just gave it the word Athena and it based on this big image prompt that I can show you in a minute and it’ll generate 10 probe and I suggest variations and then we’ll pick one that seems like it matches the best. Often times, sometimes about 50 % of the time it’s pretty good off the get go like this. And then another 50 % of the time. It doesn’t know what to do. Like this is, there’s mustaches all over the place. We talk about that. I don’t know what pod man is exactly, but I’m assuming none of this is great for it. So what I’m to have to do for this one is figure out what pod man is and then give it a little more instruction. And this is another one that I think is kind of working for the most part. ⁓ Wednesday Adams, although it looks a little angry. So like we want to keep it friendly. So I probably will give a little suggestion about that.Beah⁓ You want to talk about the mustache problem?GabrielYeah, so you pointed this out after we had about 100 that like AI is really bad at placing mustaches on decks. It like, you can see in the array of these, they don’t even ask for a mustache on this one. But like this one’s like on the beak. This one’s in the beak, I guess he’s eating it.BeahYeah. Yes, those are my favorite when they’re eating their own mustache. My theory for tell me how outlandish this is, my theory is that the internet doesn’t have a lot of pictures of ducks with mustaches and thus the training material is inadequate. Although I think with this initiative, probably improving on that.GabrielI’ve been trying to just avoid it at this point. I think it’s a good theory. I have definitely tried, I tried for like a couple of days to like get better mustache instructions and it did not work. A couple of things I wanted to highlight. So what’s actually been most fun about this now is that, because the intention was to delight people from Easter eggs. The community, especially on our subreddit, very excited about this. So much so, especially this one.BeahHahaha.Gabrielcommunity member, actually I don’t know how to pronounce it so I might get this wrong. think they might be French, Sean Mack, apologies if I did that wrong, actually has made a categorizing all the ones that they found ⁓ and also taking suggestions which is gonna be helpful for us. But what’s been fun is they’ve been trying to find them. We haven’t told them which ones exist. So there is infinite theoretical possibilities here. We haven’t even really told them how many there are, I think we should reveal it on this podcast. We have our own internal logo file, this one, so I’m not gonna show them all of them, but there might be one on this page that they haven’t seen. But at the bottom, I have my own count here. There’s 364 currently. And their count,BeahThe big reveal.Gabrielyes, their count is 322.So that is 44 that they need to or that are out there to find.BeahBut by next week the number might be larger. Is that right?GabrielYes, it probably will be larger, if that is correct. And then the one last thing I wanted to show you, which you might find interesting, let me, it’s a different screen. Let’s see here. This is actual code, but I’m not actually gonna go crazy with the code. I just wanted to show, because I think it might be interesting, how this works, the prompt. BeahOkay. ⁓GabrielIt was a lot of iteration to actually get it to work. And this is the current prompt, which changes a little bit, but it basically takes our logo and it takes in at the end. I’m gonna make this a little bigger. Do the whole thing. It plugs in the theme thatyou give it at the end and any additional guidance. But this whole part here is just instructions of getting it to modify our current logo in a way that tries to keep the beak structure intact, like the parts of the logo intact that are important, but add things to the theme. And we don’t need to walk through this or anything, but this is kind an example of what a of evolved deep AI prompt looks like that is doing this thing.BeahOkay. Okay. Nice. Okay.GabrielCool. All right. I’m gonna stop sharing. So I know we were also going to talk a little bit about Delight because this feature is intended to Delight, but at a higher level, we as a company have a focus on Delight this year, probably next year. We always wanted Delight users, but we have a particular focus on trying to build and Delight into our product. I know you’ve been thinking a lot about that.This is a good example of it, but generally any thoughts you can give us on delight.BeahYeah, I mean, first, like, maybe it’s worth just defining what I think delight means, what product delight is. It’s not a very fancy definition. I just think it’s ⁓ product experiences that make people feel good. So you can have product experiences that work in the sense of they accomplish some goal or meet some, you know, acceptance criteria, but they don’t make people feel good.Maybe they make people feel grumpy or frustrated or sad, or maybe just they don’t make people feel anything. ⁓ And that’s fine sometimes, but it’s nice to feel good. We’re all, humans and not robots. And ⁓ it is good to use products and interact with the world in a way that is, that makes you feel things and feels delight and joy. And so we want that. ⁓ And I think it is, it’s, it’s a, ⁓tricky in lots of ways. One is that different people feel good about different things. And so that’s been an interesting.⁓ challenge is trying to figure out like what are the forms of delight that we think are going to meet our users where they’re at given we have an extremely diverse user base and we value that and value the differences in that user base. But I think we’ve had some good successes. can give a few examples of places where we have delight in our product. ⁓ An old... Yeah.GabrielYeah, please. We have question for you. Do you think, I I think Delight’s wider than, I mean, the Easter egg kind of stuff is Delight. It’s like things that you find that are...I also think of delight, I think you think of the same way, but let me know if not. It could be a really just good polished regular workflow. ⁓ You’d have to notice it, and you get to notice it, you’re saying, to feel delightful, but it could be more just a regular product thing, not like this like special thing, you know?BeahYeah. Yeah. I think so. I mean, think in fact, the best forms of delight actually make the product work better for you than it would if you did it in a non-delightful way. So like when you can like find the intersection of, you know, the product actually delivering on its promise and doing so in a like somewhat surprising delightful way that makes you feel something, I think that’s like, that’s the top of the pyramid of good delight.GabrielLike this app just like accomplished what I wanted to accomplish and it did it amazingly. BeahYeah, yeah, yeah. I think sometimes that can just come in the form of really nice touches and polish. I think sometimes, I think there’s just a whole spectrum of how you can do that. An example maybe that’s not super obvious in this respect, the way that you clear data in the DuckDuckGo browser is with the fire button. And so there we’re using an analogy and something from the natural world.to do something that you can do in other browsers. ⁓ But we’re also bringing it forward so that it’s just always there in one tap away. We gave it a personality. And I think that’s delightful. And I think it’s delightful in a way that does actually enhance the functionality. Like I said, it’s just you don’t have to go through menus and choose a lot of things. You can just hit a button and get the effect you want.And yeah, I mean, there’s something satisfying about like something being burned up, you know? And so in as much as it actually like lets people delete their data when they want to, like it makes that actually work better for them. It makes it more accessible to them. I think that is probably merging functionality and delight.GabrielYeah. Yeah, it’s a great example. Yeah, not only have we made it front and center, which makes it really easy to do, which I think people just like, because I hear that feedback all the time, but we also, it has a visual flair. Like we added a visual element to it. Like when you hit the fire button, you see, like you said, literally burning up your tabs, which I think is like it ends. It ends in a, has a good ending, has a climactic ending. Are there any others you want to point out?BeahYeah. Yeah. Yeah, maybe two at totally different ends of the spectrum. One is, this probably doesn’t help with the functionality, it’s just purely cute in my opinion and I like it and I suspect many people haven’t realized this, but the shield that we have in the URL bar in our browsers and elsewhere at DuckDuckGo is actually in the shape of a duck foot. ⁓ I’ve always really appreciated that.GabrielYeah, do too. Yeah, I don’t think many people notice, but yeah, I agree. If you do notice, really is kind of an Easter egg. Yeah, exactly. You cannot see it. Perfect.BeahYeah, you can’t unsee it. Um, and then another one at the opposite end of the spectrum, think, is, uh, cookie pop-up blocking. So like, this one’s weird because it’s, we’re taking something that you see all the time on the internet that’s kind of annoying and not helpful and we’re removing it. And so it’s a little tricky to do that delightfully because like, how do you make something delightful that people, when you’re actually like removing, you know,a cognitive experience from how people are using your product. One of the ways, I mean, I do think to some extent, like if you’ve been in a different browser and you’re visiting a lot of sites with cookie pop-ups and you’re just like tired of it, I think just, you know, spending a day in our browser and not having that experience is probably delightful to some. But we also did add like a little animation in the URL bar that just kind of shows you that we blocked a cookie pop-up that...I think is like a nice reminder that we remove some friction without putting friction back in front of you and interrupting you because it’s just like in the URL bar while you can still interact with the page and so forth.Gabrielgood example. Yeah I’ve always found it tricky because yeah you know you really need to know that we did it to be delightful fully but you don’t want to interrupt people to let you know that you did it because that’s another pop-up. ⁓ Yeah interesting. So one that I would like us to do eventually which I keep pulling forward with another hack days is like various people have made games ⁓ that we could somehowBeahYeah, exactly.Gabrielput in the browser, especially in the 404 situation. ⁓ Flappy Bird ⁓ is the one that I’ve seen the most from Hackdays, and I would love to get that in, but maybe somebody will do that at some point. ⁓ Any closing thoughts?BeahClosing thought, yes, I have one, is that in trying to navigate what kind of delight do we want to create, what is actually going to be delightful to ⁓ the majority of our users, one heuristic that we’ve used internally that I really like is looking for things at the intersection of delight and trust. ⁓DuckDuckGo’s vision is to raise the standard of trust online, and I think trust is one of our greatest assets as a company. ⁓ And so I think in the space of delight, you could maybe err by finding things that are funny to some people or amusing to some people or charming to some people, but they’re actually annoying or self-promotional. And those things would not build trust. ⁓ Doing things that are respectful of the user, that areauthentically us that are approachable, that increase transparency. I think those are, tend to be things that build trust and are delightful. And so that is the filter that I’ve been trying to put on ⁓ thinking about how we design things. And I think the team has as well.GabrielSo you put the shield and cookie pop-up management in that that bucket.BeahI think so. I don’t know if having a duck foot ⁓ shield builds trust. I mean, maybe in as much as it tells you a little bit about just like who we are and in that way.GabrielYeah, guess it’s not really protection. It’d more like the animation we have around the shield where it’s showing you what trackers we’re blocking, that kind of thing. Yeah.BeahYeah, yeah,I think so. ⁓ I think so. think like the another example that maybe is like, we encourage feedback from users and we try to create like open lines of communications with users and we try to make it really easy to report when something is wrong and we try to like, and we actually read those reports and we act on them and we like, change the product and we try to be responsive on, you know, Reddit, for instance. ⁓which is a place where we can actually respond to people on like if somebody just sends us feedback through ⁓ search. I don’t know, that’s I think another example of building trust and that we’re actually like humans behind this thing that care and like want to know if something’s going wrong. ⁓ If there’s things that we’ve launched that we are excited about, but we know might disrupt people in some way and we’ve tried to proactively message those and make it really easy to get feedback. ⁓So that’s one of my favorite examples to a product manager of me, suppose.GabrielNo, I think that’s great. Okay, cool. Well, let’s wrap. I suspect you’re gonna be back a lot being a host for other things. So I guess a recurring character on DuckTales. So thank you, Beah, and we’ll see. You’re alive, so no live people. Making me make an exception. But yes, till next time, thank you for tuning in. See you later, everybody.BeahHahaha.Maybe I can get a DAX. ⁓ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com

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• Duck Tales: DuckDuckGo now lets you customize the ‘personality’ of AI responses (episode 3)

  In this episode, Gabriel (Founder & CEO) speaks with Nirzar (Duck.ai lead) about how we’re making AI more useful by letting users choose the tone and length of AI responses. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.Gabriel Hello again, welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and talk about things going on inside the company and features for building, cetera, et We’re gonna talk AI again. Today I have Nirzar with me. Nirzar, you wanna introduce yourself?NirzarYeah, sure. the designer for Duck.ai. I kind of lead the product. And yeah, we’ve been working together. Yeah, mean, yeah, it’s actually been super nice to have like that product here. And yeah, I’ve been kind of working on Duck.ai for last two years. Actually, we started like doing the MVP together, Gabe, you and I, we were kind of playing around.Gabriel You’re more than a designer. You’re more than a designer at this point.Yes, indeed. So Duck.ai is our chat equivalent, AI chat equivalent. ⁓ It’s private chat. You can access popular models from within it. What are the model providers we have now? Here’s our.Nirzar Right now we are offering GPT4 Mini which is our default. We also started offering GPT5 Mini which is the newest model from OpenAI. Actually a lot of people are using it a lot more than we expected. But we also like focusing on open source models obviously. So the OpenAI is open source model, Llama and Mistral as well and Cloud Antropiq. So yeah, it kind of fits into our idea about just giving a lot of choice to the users, yeah.Gabriel Model choice, all the major providers. Yeah, okay. So my quick spiel on our AI approach that I gave last time, but for anyone new. Approach to AI, private, useful, optional, private. In this case, know, it applies to all our AI features, but in this case, you know, we anonymize chats. We don’t train on data. We have bunch of other privacy features in there. Do you want to hit on a couple?Nirzar Hmm.Yeah mainly I think the storing the chats on your local devices, I think a big one. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the like the biggest sort of thing that we’ve been pursuing is also having like retention of chats and like not having any retention in most cases, which is actually like most industry standard. ⁓Gabriel Yes, if you have recent chats, they’re gonna be stored on your local device, not on DuckDuckGo servers.Nirzar And we’re also looking into some private inference stuff, but we’ll get to that later.Gabriel Great, mainly anonymous and not training. Useful, we’re gonna get to that in a second, because we’re gonna talk about customization, which I think is a super useful feature that we added recently. And then optional, just a couple words on that. ⁓ All our AI features are optional, including Duck.ai. I mean, obviously you can choose not to use it if you don’t wanna use it in general. In our integrations into our search engine and browser, we have settings that will turn it off.Gabriel So there’s no integration of the search engine if you don’t want it. No integration of the browser if you don’t want the entry points. Although we do think you should check it out because we do think it’s useful in private. ⁓ But we understand people who don’t want to do that for various reasons.Nirzar Yep. If you’re gonna use it somewhere else, it’s better to use it here if you care about privacy.Gabriel That’s a good way to put it. Yeah. Okay. So back to useful customization. We’re here today to talk about feature that we’ve been working on. You want to introduce it, maybe share screen.Nirzar Yeah, I can go through it. Yeah, no, I just like remember where it came from when you asked me to talk about it and I remember you were kind of annoyed at like use of emoji and responses and also like how big the responses are. I sometimes like it but I gotta get that and I think what you mentioned was like if like I don’t like it, I’m pretty sure a bunch of people don’t like it as well. So we kind of talked about like, hey.Gabriel Yes, I’m very Gen X and I don’t like emojis. ⁓Yes.Nirzar Like I think what kind of we concluded was just the idea that like there is not like a single personality that we can land on that will like kind of suit everyone. And we always try to give choice to users. ⁓ So I think this kind of fits into the choice and control obviously. And this kind of fits into that ⁓ category. Let me just give you a demo quickly of how it works.Gabriel Yeah, while you’re doing that,where I was coming from with that too, was like chatting, this whole feature of chatting is very obviously conversational. like you’re talking to somebody, know, that we’re personifying the AI in this case. I mean, there are people you like to talk to and there are people you don’t like to talk to, there are people you like their texts and there are people you don’t like their texts. Here you can control that. And that would be the idea is to give users control about like what kind of responses. If you’re going to be chatting with this thing a lot.NirzarYeah.YeahGabriel Like, what do you want it to sound like, you know? I think that’s kind of the idea for me. And not everybody would choose the same thing.Nirzar Yeah, it’s very personal. think this personality thing is very kind of difficult to nail down on anything. In those cases, it’s just better to sort of give that ⁓ to each user. They can decide what they want. So I’ll just show one quick thing. By the way, I think a lot of this was like, it’s reusing a lot of these tools. like ChatGPT also has something similar, but I think what you and like what we wanted to do is just like putting it like friend and center. So basically like this is a very small example. Don’t take greetings to chatbots are any popular anymore, but let’s say you are, no?Gabriel I’m not seeing it yet, Nirzar. I got a black screen, so, nah, weird. Try to reshare. It worked before. We tested this. Try it one more time. it doesn’t work, I’ll try mine. there you go. Yeah, it works now. Go for it.Nirzar Yeah, we tried that. I would be surprised. All right, perfect. ⁓ Yeah, so we also wanted to like kind of put it front and center. And this is one example of just like saying.Gabriel I think that’s super important because it’s like it’s a front and center thing. you’re going to, this is a very important thing to change the personality. So it’s not hidden behind settings. That’s a big design departure.NirzarYeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t think like anybody else had this like this prominent and it kind of like incentives to use it as well. Try it out, see how it works. If you don’t like it, that’s fine. ⁓ So yeah, I think the personality thing that we were talking about was just like, like the tonality, like use of emojis, for example, but like, as you can see, this is like a base model. It’s like Claud, Sonnet 4 and if you ask it,How’s it going? It’s like, it’s nice to connect with you. How are things on your end? This is like not a very good way to like, these words just like make me a little bit irk. But yeah, like I mean, this is like if you just customize it and this is what we came up with to begin with, which is like just the idea of like customizing the tone or like how long the response should be or like naming is also pretty good. Nirzar Like if I just ask it to call me by name. By the way, all of this is kind of stored on your local device to protect your privacy again.Gabriel Yeah, actually, one thing we didn’t say is you don’t even need an account to use Duck.ai. You can just show up at Duck.ai and start doing this without anything. And you can use pseudonyms too, you know.Nirzaryeah. Actually, you know what?Yeah, but you know what like when we didn’t think about it when we like made Duck.ai without logins But like when we released it like the biggest positive thing was like people were like, I don’t have to sign up It’s like a huge deal apparently but like I don’t think we thought about it that much but it’s really good I think that that’s why it worked really well. Anyway, sorry coming back to this I digress ⁓Gabriel That’s what we would call a strategy credit for being a privacy company since we don’t have accounts. We didn’t even have an ability to log in.Nirzar Hahaha Sorry, we..Sorry, I meant we thoroughly thought about it and it was a great decision. ⁓ Okay, so I’m gonna ask it to call me by my new real name and I’m gonna say my tone, I want it to be like a little bit more playful, as I said connect with you. This is pretty simple. If I apply it, it’s going to store it on your thing. there is a much great I like it. ⁓ Anyways, but instantly just like such like just a very different response to the same model. And this is what we mean by like, like even a little bit of instructions can like make the most out of it. ⁓ This just made me like want to talk to it. I don’t know. Just calling it by your name or your nickname.GabrielAnd we, and like you mainly, but you like built in these options, right? Like you, like the ones that you suggested there.Nirzar Yeah. Yeah, so I think we worked a lot on these. I really like the ducky one that you wrote, these instructions which are pretty cool. Kind of pretends to be a duck, which is fun. And actually I use it a lot in like work stuff, because it kind of adds a little bit of these like...Gabriel Yeah.It was more like a throwaway idea, but yeah.Nirzar⁓ But yeah, just battling around digital port. It’s kind of stupid, but I like it. But yeah, I think we worked on this. The thing that we worked on the most was like this AI roles. ⁓ I think like it was actually kind of fun to write a bunch of these.I particularly like Chef one, cause I cook a lot and I think I used all my cooking knowledge to kind of inform to like all write all the instructions for Chef, like with the templates and stuff. like if you ask for a recipe, it’s gonna like give you a very specific template. The other thing I really like here is the instructions part. And this is kind of like goes to transparency thing. ⁓ We show like whatever we tell to. what instructions we provide to Duck.ai. All of this is transparent. You can see exactly what instructions are getting passed onto the model, which is kind of nice. But yeah, I think it seems very simple on the front, but there’s a lot of complexity behind it running in the background. And I think that was kind of the goal for designers as well, to make it super simple and doing all this work in the background.Gabriel Sweet. All right, you can stop sharing your screen if you want. Let’s drill down to a couple things though there. So we were talking about the tone and response, which I think is critical if you’re gonna talk to something all day and like it. But then the AI roles that you mentioned briefly, like the chef, that is kind of a separate thing. Because now we’re saying, hey, independent of how you wanna talk to me, could you act like a teacher or a chef or a weightlifting assistant or we have like 20 of them or something. And as I understand it, like, you you especially with the team went and, you know, found some good instructions to help the AI become that role. And if you actually want to do that kind of thing and jump into that role, it’s just like, you get a lot better response.Nirzar Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.You get a lot more. I mean, we did a lot of testing on like how much it differs and how good it is at following the instructions. ⁓ I think one thing that I would say is I think the hardest part was to like make, because we offer so many models, like it’s so difficult. Like if you ask the same instruction to Mistral versus to Claude, it’s like Mistral won’t do something certain times and Claude will do it. And then you just have to like figure out how to like do the prompt engineering.So that was kind of challenging, but I think we got, I don’t know, we got like pretty good set of instruction that are like very, like we’re trying to get to like more predictable sort of responses where we can, you know, assume it’s gonna follow these instructions.GabrielGot it. And then you also showed, I think I wanted to highlight is the system prompt. the, you, using an industry term here, but the, user prompt is what you’re typing in. The system prompt is what we’re talking about changing here, which is like the instructions that were given to the AI that apply to all the responses. But we’re actually showing you what the system prompt looks like in terms of these changes, how it applies. And you could, there was another box there. You can.Gabriel You can change, you can add your own to, the end of it. So like if you, to your point, if you’re switching models and there’s something about the model you like or you don’t like, that particular model, you could add to it.Nirzar Yep. Yeah, I mean, it’s already such a black box about like how things are working behind the screen. Like, do you want to add one more layer of like, okay, there is something else happening on top of what the model is doing. like, think giving that much at least like transparency is helpful in my opinion. Like, you just don’t know what’s happening behind the screens.Gabriel Agreed. Okay, so what is next? What are we working on next with this, if we can say?Nirzar Yeah, so I’ve been kind of noticing how I’m using it. Actually, I haven’t talked about this a bit with you before this conversation, but the way I’ve been using it is like, I think I’m like trying to figure out like there are kind of two different ways I’ve been using it. One is sort of this tone and like things that I kind of generally looking for in any of the conversations I’m doing versus these like tasks.So like I do a lot of like these repeatable things. So like an example is like I’m learning how to code better. I’m a designer, but like I’m doing that. And like, I have this like set of instruction that I always kind of append to a blog of code so it can explain what the code is doing to me as a designer. And this is like a repeatable task. So like there are some of these customizations that are like good for particular conversations. And some of the instructions are like particular for overall sort of like always on your entire Duck.ai experience. And I think we’ve got to find out like how we can like make that distinction better and make the interface better so that we can kind of support both of these like doing the task like over and over again every single time versus ⁓ something that kind of like exists in everything. ⁓ Can I share my screen? I can show you.Gabriel Yeah, I was kind of seeing it semi blurry. So it’s like, it’s possible Adam’s going to make us record this whole thing again. But so we may just want to like talk about it briefly and then share after, but instead, but I would say that I haven’t talked to you about this yet, but I completely agree with everything you said. in fact, I was coming out from a different angle, which isGabrielActually two different angles one is I have prompts that I want to use all the time remember repeatedly and right now I have to copy and paste them and There really seems like there should be a way to like have that bank saved, you know and then independently the roles like I find myself not using them as much as I actually want to or should because It seems like it’s mixing the what I want to be constant as my system prompt for tone and this one-off task for a role. So it does seem like I know I advocate for combining them into one interface, but we probably should split them at some point, maybe in some of this and why don’t we talk after and then we’ll maybe we’ll have another episode about it. Any, yeah, cause we’re at like, I don’t know how long we’re supposed to go, but I think we’re, we exceeded the 15 minute mark on this. Nirzar Yeah. Hahaha ⁓ Yeah? Yeah, sure sure.Okay.Gabriel Okay, closing thoughts, Nirzar. ⁓ What about usage response feedback? Has it been positive?Nirzar Feedback has been good. mean, you know, a bunch of people already like were asking for it but like tech savvy people obviously like ask for it more so they’re gonna be like, can...is like I don’t like emojis and like you have to kind of figure out where that balance is so people who are asking for it obviously happy about it.And others I think like yeah like I just pulled up some numbers. 20 % people use tone which is like the highest usage of any of the customizations. The next one is the 16 % people use the role of the chatbot and then everything else is kind of like long tail after that. But yeah overall it’s been nice like 6 to 7 % of like all the Duck.ai chats right now happening are using some sort of customization which is like again a bit higher than I expected because we kind of did this yeah we kind of did this like throw away thing to begin with to kind of see the appetite and I think a lot of people are using it so I think it’s it’s worth sort of like spending more time on this to make it betterGabriel Yeah, it’s higher than I expected too. Yeah. Cool, okay, so I realize I didn’t construct a closing line for these episodes yet. That I’m gonna have to do. So, here’s our, yeah. Thank you for coming. Thank you everyone for listening and until next time.Nirzar Let’s chop. Yeah. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com

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