Internet search engine DuckDuckGo hops aboard the AI train

(Image: DuckDuckGo)

DuckDuckGo has partnered with OpenAI, creators of the bot sensation ChatGPT, and Anthropic, an AI research and safety company to roll out new AI features for the internet search engine.

Called DuckAssist, it is an enhancement of the Instant Answer feature of the search engine that pools a list of pre-determined sources to answer your queries.

When searching for a topic, you would see a pop-up below the search bar for the assistant. It will prompt you to check whether it should scan sources to provide more info on the topic, and then display the results in the search screen.

DuckDuckGo said that during the initial trials, it is limiting the assistant to DuckDuckGo's app or browser extensions. Additionally, the source has also been limited to Wikipedia, for now.

The company said that the assistant is, "likely to appear in our search results when users search for questions that have straightforward answers in Wikipedia."

DuckAssist will not prompt you for questions that are more recent or don't have information available on Wikipedia.

The company said that, "DuckDuckGo won’t generate accurate answers all of the time. We fully expect it to make mistakes."

This is because there is a limit to the information they can cross-reference and they use, "specific sentences in Wikipedia we think are the most relevant; inaccuracies can happen if our relevancy function is off, unintentionally omitting key sentences, or if there’s an underlying error in the source material given."