DuckDuckGo Launches DuckAssist To Join AI Race

Everyone knows that DuckDuckGo is one of the privacy-focused search engines that has been using Wikipedia as the primary source for instant answers for many years. Recently, the search engine has unveiled DuckAssist, a new feature that will help to generate natural language answers to search queries using Wikipedia.

What Is DuckAssist & How Does It Work?

Let me tell you that the all-new feature DuckAssist will generate instant answers in search results designed to mirror the look and feel of traditional SERPs. In addition to that, this will help to scan a specific set of sources, primarily Wikipedia and other related sites like Britannica, using DuckDuckGo’s active indexing. As a result, DuckAssist will generate a brief, sourced summary of what it will find in Wikipedia above the regular private search results.

DuckAssist is claimed to use natural language technology from OpenAI and Anthropic in order to summarize the information. In this way, it is expected to provide more direct answers to users’ questions than traditional search results. The point notable here is that the generative AI technology is designed to generate text in response to any prompt, regardless of the fact whether it has the answer or not. On the contrary, DuckAssist aims to summarize information from reliable sources like Wikipedia in order to minimize inaccuracies.

The good part is that phrasing search queries as questions or including the word wiki in the search query will help to increase the likelihood of DuckAssist appearing in search results. DuckDuckGo has been considering Wikipedia relatively reliable across various subjects for many years. So, this seems to be an innovative new feature that will generate natural language answers to search queries. DuckAssist is currently in beta and lets me tell you that it is only available in English right now, however, it may be rolled out to everyone shortly if the trial goes well.