DuckDuckGo claims to diminish 'halucinations' with AI-boosted DuckAssist

DuckDuckGo has now turned into an AI-boosted search engine, according to its latest press release.

DuckDuckGo is an internet search engine that emphasises protecting searchers' privacy without any filter bubble of personalised search results. On Wednesday, the search engine announced its latest addition, an AI feature called DuckAssist that summarises results into an ‘Instant Answer.’

DuckDuckGo makes use of natural language technology from ChatGPT creator OpenAI and Anthropic to summarise. The feature is completely free and is available for all as a beta. One does not need to sign-up to use it.  

“If you enter a question that can be answered by Wikipedia 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,” reads DuckDuckGo’s press release.

However, DuckAssist is not a chatbot like ChatGPT or Microsoft's Bing Chat. It is instead an alternative way to search. According to its press release, the privacy-focussed search engine uses online sources to give you a quick answer to your query along with citing sources, so that one saves on time by not having to look further on the internet.

DuckAssist’s scope is however, only limited to just Wikipedia and “occasionally related sites like Britannica”. This may change in the future.

DuckDuckGo claims that the answers from its search engine will be more directly responsive to the user's actual question than traditional search results. It recommends users to ask more objective questions like “what is a search engine index?” rather than subjective questions like “what is the best search engine?” It claims that it is less likely to hallucinate, a problem that has surfaced with AI-boosted Chatbots.

"However, by asking DuckAssist to only summarise information from Wikipedia and related sources, the probability that it will “hallucinate” — that is, just make something up — is greatly diminished," the press release read.

However, it adds that there might be some mistakes.

"DuckAssist won’t generate accurate answers all of the time. We fully expect it to make mistakes. Because there’s a limit to the amount of information the feature can summarise, we use the 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."

Since it is still in beta mode, the company says that DuckAssist may also make mistakes when answering especially complex questions, simply because it would be difficult for any tool to summarise answers in those instances.

Recently AI-driven search engines like ChatGPT and Bing have made news for their inaccurate or vague responses often described as "hallucinations". DuckDuckGo says that to eliminate this problem they have limited the scope to Wikipedia rather than gathering information from all across the web.

How to use it?

1) You can either download the DuckDuckGo app on your mobile or integrate the DuckDuckGo extension on your browser.

2) Type in your questions and try to keep them straightforward and objective.

3) If you don't find DuckDuckGo for your search, try adding "wiki" in your search.