The most recent search engine to transition from a “dumb” to an AI-enhanced one is DuckDuckGo. On Wednesday, the privacy-focused search engine debuted DuckAssist, an AI function that compiles results into a “Instant Answer.”
DuckAssist is not a chatbot, in contrast to ChatGPT and Bing Chat. Consider it a different approach to searching. In order to save you time searching the web, it uses online resources to provide you with a rapid answer to your question (together with citations).
According to a press release from DuckDuckGo, “if you enter a question that Wikipedia can answer into our search box, DuckAssist may appear and use AI natural language technology to anonymously generate a brief, sourced summary of what it finds in Wikipedia — right above our regular private search results.
Today, Wikipedia and “sometimes related sites like Britannica” are all that DuckAssist covers, although this is expected to change in the future. The AI tool uses natural language technologies from Anthropic and OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, to summarize.
According to DuckDuckGo, the AI tool’s responses ought to be “more immediately responsive to your real enquiry than typical search results.” Nonetheless, the search engine business encourages users ask queries like “what is a search engine index?” rather than more subjective ones like “what is the best search engine?”.
When there are multiple things connected with a given query, AI-boosted search engines occasionally “hallucinate” answers and mix up facts. DuckDuckGo claims that by focusing on Wikipedia rather than data from across the entire web, it has significantly decreased these.
There is no need to register in order to access the DuckAssist beta function, which is entirely free. DuckDuckGo intends to shortly roll out further AI-enhanced search and browsing services.
The latest search engine to include generative AI into its search results is DuckDuckGo. This news follows the addition of comparable features to Brave’s own search engine.
