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 happens

is 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 directly

collect 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 % have

Meta 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 Android

Apps 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 protect

CristinaThat’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 from

really 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 not

CristinaOkay, 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 giving

the 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.

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.

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 at

BeahYeah, 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 that

you 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 somehow

BeahYeah, 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 are

authentically 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. ⁓

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.

Yeah

Gabriel 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 is

GabrielActually 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 better

Gabriel 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.

In this episode, Gabriel (Founder & CEO) introduces our vision for AI and speaks with Rachel (front-end team) about our newly released AI image filter.

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 post on our approach to AI — private, useful, and optional.

GabrielHello, hello everybody. Welcome to DuckTales. This is our series where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo. I'm the founder of DuckDuckGo. I have Rachel here who works at our company. Hi, Rachel.

RachelHi!

GabrielSo, DuckTales is really about discussing the technology we use, the people working on it, how we're building privacy tools. We hope you'll join us. You'll hear about all aspects of DuckDuckGo essentially.

Today, we are talking about AI a bit and in particular a feature that we recently released that allows you to filter out AI generated images on our search results. Taking a step back, our approach to AI is, we wrote a whole post on this if you want to check it out, maybe we can figure out how to put things in show notes.

But three things: private, useful, and optional. So private kind of goes without saying, that's what we do at DuckDuckGo. But with AI in particular. You know, we're focused on, you know, Rachel, you know this, so just saying this for everybody else listening. We're focused on keeping it anonymous and also not training on your data. And then useful is we're really trying to make AI tools that are actually useful, not just for the sake of using them, but...so they're actually useful. So on the search engine, you know, we have answers now at the top that kind of help you figure out what you're trying to look for without having to click through a lot of results. Although you're welcome to, of course, and the sources are clearly labeled there. But the third pillar is optional. So not everybody wants to use AI. We realize that.

And so we've been approaching it by making everything optional. And so you can turn off those answers at the top of the search engine. You can turn off our chat product, Duck.ai, which brings us to the AI image filter, which is a little different type of feature because it's not something that we're doing generation of images, although we're probably going to end up doing that sometime. It's more in that optional camp, taking AI away if you really would like to. You want to explain it a little bit?

RachelYeah, so the AI Image Filter, actually let me just share my screen so I can quickly demo it as we talk about it. So the AI Image Filter is a feature you can find on our image filter bar. So up here, this is the filter here. And you can also find this feature on our user settings page. But yeah, it's literally what the name suggests.

A filter that filters out AI-generated images. At a high level, you can put in a query. And if we detect that you've enabled the feature, then our images service is going to do some basic pattern matching against a block list that we have and return the filtered results.

The list itself is actually from an open source project called Ublock Origin. And I did want to take a second to give a shout out to the project maintainer, Laylavish and the 40 plus contributors to the project. I think they started this project like a year ago and they've been doing a great job frequently updating the list. So huge props to them for helping make this feature possible.

GabrielSo great query. I have two cats. Is the filter list that we're currently using for this, is that at a domain level?

RachelDomain, like the file of the image and where that domain or where the file lives in that domain.

GabrielSo it could be, it's kind of like the general UBlock rules. It's like a reg X type of thing, but it could be at the URL pattern, whatever people want.

RachelExactly, URL pattern matching. That's exactly it.

GabrielGot it, and so it works now where if it's on that list and you select this filter, we'll just remove it client side from you.

RachelExactly.

GabrielCool. And have we looked at other lists? I mean, is that like the main list we found? Did we kind of look at other things? Are we looking at other things?

RachelYeah, this was the main list that we had found. There are definitely a handful of other lists that were maybe not as frequently updated. And so I think this one was probably the most reliable one to use.

GabrielGot it. Let's speak to why people might want to use this. It's gotten a, well, first of all, let's say that it's gotten a lot of support when we put this out. It was high on like Reddit technology. Saw all sorts of articles about it and it's being reported in our subreddit a lot of people really appreciate the feature. And kind of to think about why, you know, there's clearly value in AI generated images because you can get things that didn't exist. And so there, I think there's definitely value in seeing AI images, but then there's also value in when you want to use something in real life that it wasn't AI. You want to know that it wasn't AI generated.

RachelRight, yeah. I mean, one of the big reasons why we built it was because we were seeing a huge spike from users about not wanting to see AI. And it's understandable. So many things on the internet now are generated by AI. And it can be really mentally exhausting to have to process. Like, is this AI or is this not? I just want to find the thing that I'm looking for. Yeah, the users were really vocal about just not wanting to deal with it.

GabrielInteresting. And then, so I understand that we're, you know, certainly after the support, it's a feature we're definitely going to keep. And so now we're also trying to improve it if we can. What areas of improvement are you looking towards that we're exploring?

RachelMm-hmm. Yeah, so as soon as we launched, we got immediate feedback from users again on little things that we could do to improve the feature. I think one of the most frequently requested feature was the ability to flag images that they believe were AI generated. So I'm actually going to roll this out right after we finish recording this. So we're going to have that ability for flagging images.

I think once we start getting reports in, there's a lot of different directions we can go from there. If we get enough reports on a specific domain, we'll probably do some sort of vetting process to improve the block list itself. I think we could also potentially allow for users to create their own custom block list, sort of like how we allow users to exclude certain domains for organics.

And I think more like in the long term, we do have people on the team exploring other open source solutions and classifiers and also like the image metadata, like how we can leverage that to better determine if an image is AI generated. But it's still like a matter of figuring out what the right balance is between those options, just because like image metadata, for example, anyone can tamper with the image. They can strip the metadata, can edit it or crop it or whatever. So it's still a pretty fragile source of truth and even the classifiers, like best ones maybe will get 80-90% of accuracy but it's not going to be bulletproof. So yeah, we're trying to figure out what combination is the right one for getting enough accuracy and also keeping cost and latency in mind.

GabrielYeah, so a couple of follow-ups on that. So again, it is important for us to be clear that it's definitely not 100% accurate in either direction. It could let things through that are AI generated, and it can also theoretically flag some things as AI generated that are not AI generated. And so it's an effort here, and we're going to try to improve it, but it probably will never be 100% accurate.

RachelYeah, yeah. No, I mean, it's sort of, yeah, the problem is really interesting. And in some ways, I'm like wondering if it's probably a longer discussion. But like, if we don't have some sort of change at, like, I don't know if this is the right term, but like at a policy or an infrastructure level on how we actually maintain, like we need a consistent way to be able to really know if the data on the image is reliable.

And It's sort of like playing whack-a-mole right now, but if we can contain the mole, then it would be maybe a little bit easier. But right now, if we don't have that, I think the issue will unfortunately become more prevalent and even harder to solve.

GabrielI have heard some rumors at least in some reports of some standards being worked on in that regard. It possibly would help. The other thing you mentioned was, you know, we're using the block list, which is obviously kind of on or off of it. So it's very fast. Whereas if we were starting to use classifiers, that might be too slow in real time to like do it on the search results. And then it's also expensive to offer for these. And so I think that's...

RachelExactly. Yeah.

Gabriel...the trade off there with the classifier. It's also interesting to note of using AI to stop seeing AI generated images.

RachelThe irony there, yeah. Especially because we're dealing with hundreds of millions of images a day. Even with a good caching layer, I think it'll still be a difficult problem to solve there.

GabrielCool, well, is there anything else from working on this so far? Do you want to flag anything interesting or, I don't know, that we didn't talk about?

RachelI think the biggest thing is the problem itself is super interesting. For me personally though, if I could share when I started this project, I was only four months in at DuckDuckGo, so everything was surprising and then I was still getting to know the product and the users. It's kind of a funny story how the project even came to be.

We knew this problem was happening. I think like over 50% of user complaints about images was about not wanting to see AI. So we knew we had to do something. It's just that the problem was huge. And then like we talked about it for a while, kind of punted on it. And then summer came around with the hack days and I kind of decided to revisit the problem. And I think the interesting thing about a hackathon is that it's just two days. You're really forced to think, like, what am I actually going to get done here? And coincidentally, at the time, I was looking into a bug that users were reporting. So there were some users who already had this block list and the U-block browser extension installed, and they were dealing with some bugs. And I was looking into that, and that's actually how I came across the block list.

And I figured, you know, if there are users who are going out of their way to install this extension, put this list on, and this is the solution that's sort of working for them for the time being, like, why not make this more widely and easily accessible for users? So the solution actually was really inspired by our users. And I really love how this feature was like end to end, like purely user driven. Like it was built based on user feedback. The solution itself is something that users came up with, and then even now, after we've launched, we're constantly listening to what users are suggesting to help move the feature further along.

GabrielAwesome. Yeah, future for these episodes should definitely ask where this project came from. The list of questions we need to ask. But yeah, it's great that you took the initiative to do it. It's also great to hear that it came out of user feedback in that channel and the hack is working too. Like, yeah, it's a great story all around. So okay, so thanks for coming on.

RachelYeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm? Yeah.

GabrielWhoever is watching this, thanks for joining our episode number two, I guess, of DuckTales, but we'll do many more.

RachelYeah. Thanks for having me. Bye.

In this episode, Kamyl Bazbaz (VP of Comms) talks with Tim Raybould (AI Lead) about the design of DuckDuckGo’s AI-assisted Search Assist — why it defaults to concise answers, and how the new “More” button lets users dive deeper when they choose.

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.

Kamyl BazbazHi, welcome to Duck Tales, where we pull back the curtain on DuckDuckGo to share stories, tech, and people building privacy tools for everyone. Today, my guest is Tim Rae Bold, who leads AI development at DuckDuckGo. Welcome, Tim.

Tim RaybouldThank you, Camille... Baz... Baz?

Kamyl BazbazThat's right. Pretty good. We're going to talk about a new feature that we just shipped on the old SERP at DuckDuckGo, which is the More button on assist. Can you briefly explain what the More button does and why we decided to add it to the AI assist answers?

Tim RaybouldYep, sure. Well, search assist, first of all, is the AI-generated answer that goes on the top of results for about a fifth of queries. That's whenever we think that the query is asking for information that can be answered concisely. And then the main thing we pride ourselves on with assist is that it is just the answer to your question and nothing more. It's unique in that way, I think, across the AI answers industry, in that it really tries to get the job done in a very short amount of words. But users for some queries were asking it to go deeper on topics, and that's the answer to the more button question. So it's a pretty simple feature. Right below the concise answer is a button that says more, and you click it, and then it will go and expand its answer into more of a... maybe like a traditional answer that you'd see in an AI chatbot that has tables and headings and it lays things out.

Kamyl BazbazVery cool. And so what problem do you feel like users were experiencing that led to this feature?

Tim RaybouldYeah, it was really just a request to go deeper on some percentage of topics. The short concise answers are just what the doctor ordered for many, many of them. But the click rate on the more button has been really good so far. It's about 10% of people are clicking that button. Around that portion of queries, the topic they asked about is they just want a little more depth with the answer.

Kamyl BazbazWhat was the biggest technical challenge you had in implementing this expanded answer?

Tim RaybouldMm-hmm. Well, I don't know how far back you want to pull the curtain. Your intro said you were pulling the—OK, well, I mean, the SERP is written in, largely written in Perl. Perl has a—it is challenging to stream the response back in Perl. So when you use an AI tool like DuckAI, our chatbot tool, the response will stream back, which means that every single set of words, it doesn't wait until the end of its response to give it to you. It gives you the response as it's going. And it's a much faster experience for users because they can start to read it as the AI is generating word after word after word. That's called streaming. In SearchAssist, we don't need to stream that concise response. We wait until it's done. We run some safety checks on it even, and then we present the answer on the page. But with the more button, it would just be too long to wait to take that same approach. So we needed to figure out streaming. And in some cases, that's not a hard technical problem at all. In our particular environment and setup, that happened to be the hardest problem. Second hardest problem is you need to come up with a prompt that explains to the AI what type of response we're looking for. Our initial prompt, as we've been saying, is very focused on being concise. But this one, we needed to figure out the right words to tell the AI to say what type of answer we want out of an expanded answer and how we wanted to lay it out and talk to the user.

Kamyl BazbazGotcha. And so how are you—I mean, it sounds like in the development of this, you were trying to balance the speed and simplicity people expect from DuckDuckGo with getting a more comprehensive answer to their question. Does that sound right?

Tim RaybouldYeah, it does sound right. Yeah. And I mean, it seems simple in retrospect that a simple button to click more was the answer, but we, as we were building search assist, you know, we knew we wanted to give more in some cases to some answers. And it was, you know, sort of a lightbulb moment to just say, well, the first step we can take is just to ship the user a button and the user can decide when they want more. So that took the burden off of us to figure out which query exactly deserves to have more of an answer. And then from a speed standpoint, that sort of solves that problem too. Because once they're engaged and clicking more, they've presumably read the concise answer, and the new answer is going to stream back, so they're going to get to read something almost right away. The speed piece there, we have a little bit more leeway to take a few seconds to deliver the answer, whereas the concise answer is coming along with a SERP and people want a fast SERP. So, can't delay that.

Kamyl BazbazWhat's been the feedback so far and then sort of what kind of data are we seeing?

Tim RaybouldIt was the number one feature request before we built it. And it has largely satisfied that request—that people asking for it has died down, as you would expect. Our overall—the main metric we use to track user satisfaction for this feature is the ratio of people clicking the thumbs up over the thumbs down. That's at the bottom of each answer. It says, was this helpful with these two options? So after we shipped the more button, the overall thumbs up to thumbs down ratio increased noticeably. People seemed to like it.

Kamyl BazbazAnd if you're thinking about the differences between DuckDuckGo, what you would see on Google, and then if you are using ChatGPT or like a Perplexity, now that DuckDuckGo has more and is easily connecting to DuckDuckAI, how would you place our offerings in that context?

Tim RaybouldYeah, well, when it comes specifically to these AI responses, I still think the main differentiator is that we play the 80-20 rule really well with the length of the answer at first. In most cases, giving the user the direct answer in a way that they don't have to spend a lot of time parsing or reading is the preferred experience. And we've heard users say that—specifically say that—your answers are so much shorter. I didn't even know I wanted that, but that makes a lot more sense in most queries. Letting the user expand into this more button is the first step into some queries do deserve a richer, deeper answer. It deserves more work from the AI to be able to do for the user. So this more button is the first step along that path. But I think there's other tools that started there and they're coming back to what people want in a search engine—the core search engine experience. They're having to add on to the core AI experience. And we just started the other way around. We started with a great search engine that already gave a bunch of instant answers that were not AI-generated—stocks and sports and weather and things like that. This, you know, our search assist tool fits right into the wider search experience for people.

Kamyl BazbazHow does this fit into, you know, the DuckDuckGo, you know, looking to the future here? How do you see this evolving? What do you think is next for these kinds of—for the search assist answer on DuckDuckGo?

Tim RaybouldWell, I think both of our AI tools will evolve. And Duck AI will get more and more ability to do things that search engines do. And a search engine will get more and more ability to lay out a search engine results page, a SERP, with the benefit of generated content from AI. The difference right now is primarily the types of queries that people are bringing to these two tools. Whether or not people's behavior merges into one tool is anybody's guess. It's a very interesting question. Right now on the search engine, most of the queries are four words or fewer. You're not typing big long prompts or asking long complicated questions. So the search assist lives on the SERP and is built for those types of queries more so. Whereas in Duck.ai we see—we don't see actually, because we don't save any of the prompts. And that can be annoying from a building a product standpoint. We know from other data sets and other tools and benchmarks that when people go to AI tools, they don't just type in four words. They're being a little bit more conversational in the way that they prompt the model. So that deserves a different—yeah, those queries are—the user is asking something different. Obviously the answer is going to be differently natured.

One more thing on the future. So right now the search assist concise answer—it goes to the model one time. One shot is the terminology in AI land. And we give it context from the web and it has all the information it needs to answer the question, and it comes up with a concise answer. But it has one shot to do that. And it's to us to feed the LLM with the right context to answer the question. But sometimes—you've seen these deep research tools around this, probably—where you could imagine that for some queries, it might want to search twice, not just once, but twice. So if I say, who is older, person A or person B, it might do two searches: how old is person A and how old is person B. And then it has all the information it needs to answer your question because probably nowhere on the internet was it written person A is older than person B. You just have to do two separate searches. That's sort of the next step, but you could imagine that going much more complicated into many searches. And maybe not just searches, but it could also use different tools other than search to gather information to answer the question. So at some point, you know, we are starting to do this on Duck AI. And it's also interesting to start to do this on search assist—to let the model, if the user tells us that they want more, they're willing to wait 10 seconds or even a minute for an answer, that we can use that time to have the LLM do a lot more things and do one thing, sort of in the loop, to answer the question.

Kamyl BazbazGot it. That sounds fascinating. People get better answers. Final question. What's one thing about building AI search features that might surprise people outside the industry?

Tim RaybouldA lot of our answers come from a cache. I think maybe that's surprising.

Kamyl BazbazCash money.

Tim RaybouldCash money, yeah, exactly. Cache with an E, yes, yes, yeah. Wu Tang was right. The cache rules. In terms of AI.

Kamyl BazbazWith an E. I see. So in that context, you're not searching for a new answer. It's something someone's already searched for before.

Tim RaybouldYeah, it's something that someone already has searched for. And what we do to make this experience quick is if someone is searching for something—even if they did not request a search assist answer—if we notice it's being searched multiple times, we will proactively generate an answer in the background so that the next person that comes along to search that will have an answer delivered instantaneously. Because when they come from the cache, from the database of existing answers, it's instant on page load. I don't know. That surprised me just how important the role of a database of already generated answers was. That brings a lot of complications with storing those answers and invalidating them at the right time. Information changes. Who is the current president or how old is this person? Those answers are not good forever. They change. So there's those types of things, but I don't know. Maybe if I had a little more time, I could come up with a more surprising thing, but that's not.

Kamyl BazbazSure, sure. I won't surprise you next time. Thank you, Tim, for joining us. Have a ducky day.

Tim RaybouldNo problem.

Tim RaybouldYou too. See ya.

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.

In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Emanuele (Engineering) discuss Sync — which lets you have consistent bookmarks, passwords, and AI chats across devices — how it’s unique from a privacy perspective, and what’s coming next.

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.

Beah: Hi, welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering or approach to AI. In this episode, we’re going to talk about our Sync feature. So today, Emanuele has joined me. I’m Beah. You haven’t met me before. I’m on the product team here at DuckDuckGo and Emanuele is, well, I’ll let you introduce yourself.

Emanuele: Yeah, thanks. Hi, Beah. Welcome everyone. I am Emanuele. I have been at DuckDuckGo for about six plus years and I’ve been involved in Autofill and Sync almost from the start. Yeah.

Beah: Cool. All right, well let’s dig in. I have a few questions for you. So first of all, what are we even talking about? What is Sync?

Emanuele: Sync is a feature that lets you synchronize your data from one device to another. For example, you may have a collection of bookmarks on your desktop and you want to see the same bookmarks on your mobile device. You set up Sync and all your data is showing across both devices seamlessly.

Beah: It sounds very handy. So you can sync bookmarks. What else can you sync across devices?

Emanuele: Yeah, you can sync also autofill data, credentials, and credit cards. You can also sync, well, we said bookmarks. Recently, we added Chat Sync, so you can sync your Duck AI chats across devices. This is currently only available for our own first-party applications, but we are expanding to other browsers as well.

Beah: Nice. So like, just to kind of paint a picture here, I have a MacBook Pro, I have a Windows laptop, I have an iPhone, and have an Android phone as well. And I’m like, you know, trying to log in to Reddit in all these places. If I save my Reddit credentials, my login, my username and my password on any of those devices, then it can automatically sync to all of those. So then the next day when I’m like out and about on my phone, if I logged in on my laptop, like the password just autofills and I can log right in. Is that right? And then now with that...

Emanuele: Exactly. Yeah.

Beah: Duck AI chats, as you’ve mentioned as well, if I wanted to like, so what’s the yeah, tell me about chats. What’s the use case there? Why do I care that it’s across my devices?

Emanuele: Well, the use case, I use it a lot personally when I chats on the desktop and then I want to continue in the evening on the couch, I can resume the same chat and continue the conversation with Duck AI from there. I also use it for looking at older chats and basically maybe I chatted with Duck AI for something a while ago, and all of a sudden I remember, oh, well, there was this information that I already discussed with Duck AI, and I can go when I’m on the go outside with a friend and show my finding even when I’m on the go. Well, with Duck AI specifically, the Sync feature also increases the limits of how many chats you can store in Duck AI. The limits used to be 30, we bumped it at 100, but with Sync you have a lot more storage, so you can store a lot more chats with Sync activated.

Beah: Nice, so if I’m like chatting on my phone, chatting on my computer, I’m like, you kind of need it because you potentially are like doubling or whatever, multiplying the volume of chats that you’re having and you don’t want to be like penalized, like lose those because they’re synced across devices. You just want them available.

Emanuele: Right. Yep.

Beah: Yeah, that makes sense. Tell me, like, let’s talk about how we do Sync from a privacy perspective. Like, are there any considerations there? How do we do it in a way that is not identifying and protects all of our users’ privacy?

Emanuele: Yeah. First of all, all of the data in Sync is encrypted end to end, which means nobody but you can access your data, not even us. We don’t have the decryption key, so the information stays encrypted on our servers and nobody can access them. We went a step further in that we don’t really ask you for emails to sign up on anything. We don’t ask you for your passwords or anything. We just set up an account in a way that’s secure with basically a random string that is used to encrypt, I’m kind of simplifying things, but like a random string that is used to encrypt your data and then the string stays locally on your device. This ensures that, you know, whatever happens in the server, the data cannot be decrypted by a malicious actor. And we, as a company, cannot know who you are. We don’t have any information on you and we don’t have any way to tie your data with a specific person.

Beah: How does that compare, like, how unique is that? Like, is that what everybody does with sync and password management or is that pretty unique and how so?

Emanuele: The end-to-end encryption is a pretty common pattern in password managers specifically. Not as much maybe in browsers, I don’t think. But the fact that the account is... that you don’t need an email to log into your account, that’s pretty unique. I don’t know that there are many other companies that do anything like this.

Beah: Yeah, I can’t think of any mainstream, well-adopted examples anyway where you don’t need an account. Cool. How hard has that been in practice? What technical challenges did it create? Or was it just hunky dory?

Emanuele: Yeah, no, it’s not easy, especially when you create an account that doesn’t have an email associated with it, it means that certain things that users are accustomed to, that they expect, they’re not there. So you have to kind of create user experiences that allow users to use their accounts seamlessly without thinking about an account, but with all the features that they expect. Specifically, the recovery part is the complex part because we don’t have data. We don’t have any way to retrieve your data. Therefore, you have to save a recovery code to decrypt the data on your side. The complexities that we face are both in terms of UX, as explained, but also there are complexities on the engineering side, as we need to ensure every time that all the flows are accounted for in this sort of accountless account. And yeah.

Beah: Yeah.

Emanuele: When we start to connect certain things together, like the chats and Sync and, you know, so we will look into subscriptions as well. We’re basically connecting different systems that all are sort of blind to the user concept, but they still have to sort of contain this data. So that’s a high level.

Beah: Yeah, as you were talking, I was thinking, this is like a great example of one of those things that’s like deeply, deeply complex. And like for it to work, you just have to like, you have to boil down that complexity and like, shield the user from that complexity and present a very simple, it works, very little room for human error, no requirement of deep understanding of how it works. And I think that is a really interesting challenge.

Emanuele: Yeah, I think our UX for setting up the account has this advantage that you don’t have to type anything and you just set it up and when you have to transfer it to another account, you just scan a QR code and the data is automatically transferred via that QR code scan. I think that’s kind of handy in the setup step. But again, it poses a few challenges then in the recovery phase.

Beah: Yeah, like you don’t have to remember a password or remember what email you used. You just have a device, another device, and then let them talk to each other. But getting there was really hard. I mean, and maybe there’s still places that we want to improve the UX, but I just, I know we’ve been like finessing it for a long time. Now I’m somebody who like has to sync things all the time because I’m constantly like uninstalling and reinstalling and trying new devices as part of my job, like testing and you know, understanding our products and looking for gaps and like, so I go through the Sync setup, you know, way more often than any normal user should have to. And it has gotten a lot better. Like I, there are moments when I’m like, that was easy, which is what we’re going for.

Emanuele: Magic.

Beah: Yeah, magic. Magic.

Emanuele: Yeah. We are actually working right now on an improvement to the Sync screens. We are going to launch an experiment on iOS first. And we hope that the Sync flow will be easier, even easier for users to understand specifically the very first step when you decide whether you want a new account or you want to connect to an existing device, that should be easier. But they’re just improvements around the existing flows rather than a new different flow.

Beah: Yeah, I think one of the things you’ve done really well as a leader of this work, Emanuele, is continuing to watch the data and poke holes in the flow and basically make sure that we’re simultaneously building new features and optimizing what we have and just making it better and better and better as we learn more. I’m curious if there are any kind of in that vein or you can leave that direction if you want. You can say whatever you want. If there are things that have surprised you in the process of building Sync and getting feedback and watching the data points and so forth.

Emanuele: Yeah, I think one sort of surprising thing was that the people were not really finding the feature organically. As soon as we started building entry points where they were useful to the user flow, meaning when you are saving a password, when you are watching a specific screen, like you are looking at your bookmarks, for example, and we show at that point a prompt that says, do you want to move this bookmark to your other device? And we do that in several touch points. And again, these have been studied to be the least intrusive possible, but also to pop up at the right moment when the feature is more salient to the user case. When we started doing these promotions, we call them promotions, we can call them entry points, basically making the feature discoverable. User adoption shot up quite dramatically and basically we were very happy to see the trajectory of adoption once we start to put in Sync front and center for the users. Basically it allows them to use DuckDuckGo, like enter the ecosystem and sort of buy into the whole system. And your data is there, your browsing is easier, your bookmarks are there, you can save something on desktop and again read that on your commute on mobile. Yeah, these entry points have been really effective.

Beah: Yeah, if you build it, they won’t come unless they see that it exists and you make it easy for them. Yeah, nice. All right. Tell me what, yeah, you kind of already touched on this, but anything that’s coming up, coming soon to Sync that you want to talk about?

Emanuele: Exactly. Yep. Yeah, a couple of things we are working on. The first is allowing third party browsers to sync their chats as well. This is the first time that we are actually building Sync on a third party browser that is not integrated with our apps basically. So that’s coming fairly soon. The new screens, we just touched on the new onboarding screen for iOS. And we’re also starting to sync subscription status. So if you have a subscription, a DuckDuckGo subscription on your mobile device, currently to move it to your desktop device, it’s quite a convoluted process. Whereas with Sync, again, we move to the QR code scanning. So if you have Sync already active, the data will start syncing automatically. And if not, you will be able to set up Sync again with a QR code right from the subscription screens and move your subscription information across very easily, which means your advanced model for Duck AI, they will transfer automatically and you can resume your advanced model chats across devices.

Beah: Nice. I am personally looking forward to that because I also go through the, you’re a subscriber, let’s retrieve your subscription flow somewhat regularly. Cool.

Emanuele: Yeah, it’s a bit convoluted. And we will also look into tab sync, which is a pet peeve of mine. I’m looking forward to that, which means that your open tabs on one device will be accessible from another device, you know, seamlessly through Sync.

Beah: Cool. Awesome. Well, I think we should wrap it up. Is there anything that you want to say that you haven’t already before we close? This is your moment, man. Go nuts. Yeah, that’s a good one. Set up Sync. It is awesome. I can vouch for that. Cool. Well, thanks so much for joining. Really appreciate it. Yeah, see you around DuckDuckGo.

Emanuele: You know, set up Sync, it’s awesome. Thank you, Beah. Bye-bye.

Beah: Thanks everyone.

In this episode, Greg (Product) and Karl (Design Engineering) discuss how we build, design and decide when to show Instant Answers. Plus, how we’re balancing instant answers with optional AI generated answers.

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.

Greg: Hello and welcome to DuckTales where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode you hear about our vision, product updates, engineering, our approach to AI from employees at DuckDuckGo. I’m Greg, I work on the search engine here at DuckDuckGo and with me today is Karl. Karl, would you like to introduce yourself?

Karl: Yeah, sure. Yeah, so I’m Karl. I’m a design engineer here at DuckDuckGo and I work across the search engine on instant answers and our Search Assist AI module.

Greg: Awesome. And that’s actually what we want to talk about today. DuckDuckGo Instant Answers, how we show instant answers for different search queries. Obviously, in a search engine, we show links to websites. But there’s a lot of other content that we show on the page as well, which I think broadly we sort of refer to as instant answers. You know things like if you search for the weather, you know, we might show a weather module at the top of the page. I’ll just share a couple examples of these. You know, so you search for weather and we try to show, you know, relevant information about the weather at the top of the page in addition to then all of the, you know, the links to different websites.

Karl: Nice.

Greg: We have things like unit conversions. If you search for a temperature and you want to convert it from Celsius to Fahrenheit, different calculations, all of these things are kind of within the umbrella of instant answers. We have had instant answers for a long time. I think really early in the history of the company and the product, recognized that when you’re pulling information from a lot of different sources, you have the ability to present that information in different ways to help the user find what they’re looking for, whether that is looking for a website that they want to navigate to, looking for an answer to a question, or looking for something a little bit more complicated. So yeah, we have lots of different instant answers, and thought we’d talk a little bit more about that today. So I guess as a starting point, I’m curious to talk about, and you mentioned being a design engineer, what are some of the challenges involved in designing and building instant answers?

Karl: So I think one of the things that I’ve always found working on these is it’s very easy to just basically take everything we get. So we will work with like a provider. Let’s say if we’re doing where to watch something, let me share my screen actually as well and we can have a look at this. We are working with a provider. So in this case, we’re working with JustWatch and using their API data. When you come to design something like this, it’s very easy to look at that and say like, okay, cool, let’s go to JustWatch’s website and have a look at what’s available. We can see their website, how they present the information they have and they give us. And you could kind of jump to say like, well, we’ll just take what they’ve done. They’ve got that data, we’re using the same data, let’s just copy the way that they’ve presented that information. That would be like the easy solution. But then you’ve got all of these sort of legacy things to deal with, like we talked about a bit earlier, we’ve had instant answers for a long time. We’ve got ways that we present our information on the search engine and we need these modules, whether they’re pre-existing or they’re new, like we need them to all feel like they belong together in some way. So it needs to sit in the search engine nicely, you know, and feel kind of like it belongs. So we can’t just do like a one-to-one copy, which, you know, as designers anyway, we don’t want to just copy what someone else has done. But when the data is so vast and so complex, it can be kind of hard if you’re not familiar with the domain so much as an individual to just figure out like, what do I even care about here? So like, here’s an example with a movie, we were trying to figure out where you can watch this, but like, where are you in the world? You know, because that’s like the first thing that’s probably one of the biggest challenges is we can’t show you the same thing if you’re in the US or the UK or Australia. You’re going to see something different.

Greg: I think you touched on a lot of important pieces to this that make this challenging. One is just understanding the user’s context. Obviously, we have limited information about our users based on our privacy policy and our privacy standards. We can approximate things like location accurately enough to be able to do things like the weather one that I showed, or this where to watch example. But that does limit us in what we are trying to do where we’re not trying to overly personalize the things that we’re showing down to a very specific user profile. And so, we have to kind of generalize and try to figure out just from the search query and that limited bit of information, what is it that we’re going to show to try to answer the user’s query. The other thing you touched on that I think is important to highlight is just the fact that this search query here is very specific and I think has a pretty clear intent where to watch a specific movie. Sometimes the intent is a little bit harder to unpack. And so you might have more different things that you could show. If you just searched for the movie title, for example, maybe someone’s trying to figure out where to watch it. Maybe they’re interested in the release date or different news about it. If it’s an upcoming movie, maybe they want to know what the cast is like. So trying to figure that out and then present the information in a way that gives users the ability to see what they’re looking for and also then refine their search down to the more specific thing. I think that adds some challenge as well.

Karl: No, I agree. I think probably one of the biggest things that I found difficult around this is exactly that is the like figuring out the query, figuring out the query space, and then defining the data set, the golden data set, as we call it, that helps us to understand when do we trigger? How do we decide what we trigger? And entertainment is especially challenging because we have three different modules that are part of the class of entertainment. We have the titles module, which is the overarching piece that tells you, you know, this movie is from this date. This is a brief synopsis and you can get to the two other modules. So this where to watch module. And then also you can get to the cast module from that parent module. But like you say, you have to trigger these differently and figure it out. And so we can do these really clear ones where someone puts the keyword in that we’re looking for, but sometimes we’ve got to try and use all these other signals from what we get from the organics or like other pieces of information that we’re retrieving to say like, actually we think this is best and you will know better than I, but like it’s incredibly hard and sometimes, you know, it doesn’t matter how hard you try, the intent might feel really obvious to the person typing it, but as far as we can derive from that information, we can’t always figure out the right thing to show you. And so we do our best, but you know, there’ll be misses sometimes.

Greg: Yeah, I want to ask you about something that’s on your screen right now because you can see, you searched the query Project Hail Mary cast and we’ve got the cast module at the top left there. We also have that Search Assist box to the right side that attempts to kind of answer the question. I guess, we’ve talked a little bit on previous episodes about Search Assist and what it’s doing. You know, how would you describe how we think about showing those two things next to each other, the different kind of roles they play, and maybe how that’s evolving over time?

Karl: I think, yeah, that’s been a big challenge for us because AI summarization is a really useful tool for some people. It’s not for everybody. And obviously, we’re super careful about giving people optionality and letting you say, I don’t want to see this. But for people who want it, people who are interested in seeing that, we don’t want to just always put that front and center as the key answer to every query. Because in a case like this, for example, Search Assist is giving you the same information, but it’s giving you it as text. And maybe we’re giving you a little bit extra too. But if I’m specifically trying to ask about the cast, there is a high chance it’s because I’m thinking of an individual who I’ve seen in the film, or I’ve heard is gonna be in the film, or what have you. And so I’m trying to see their face to be like, yes, okay, so it is Ryan Gosling who’s in Project Hail Mary. Okay, cool. And so in this case, like that is probably what we feel the most critical piece of information. So we want to give you that module upfront. But at the same time, if you’re someone who’s interested in getting a kind of AI summary as part of your query, we don’t want to then say, just, we won’t show you that tool then. And so we have this like convenient little right rail slot where we can say, actually, we’ll just move this over here. So you get kind of the what we think is the best of both worlds where we can deprioritize Search Assist in this case where the intent is really clear. And then in cases where we’re not so sure, we will do our best to try and figure out like maybe Search Assist is the best answer of this or maybe it’s a different module.

Greg: Yeah, I’ll also note, we have different sort of settings that you can use for Search Assist everywhere from, I never want to see Search Assist at all up through, show it to me as often as you can. You obviously have it set to show often here. I do too. But yeah, I mean, for this kind of query, certainly the use case you spoke to of like, I’m sitting with my family watching a movie, go, wait, who’s that? This is the type of thing where, okay, you can get that information really quickly. But I guess to your point, we recognize with a search engine, you’re walking a line between giving just the immediate information that a user is asking for and then giving them the ability to dive deeper, which a lot of people are using a search engine for. It’s sort of a, people come and type all manner of topics and things into that search box. And we kind of have to be ready for any of it and different user expectations. I would say we do, I’m curious to the extent to which you agree with this, like we do generally try to keep things relatively uncluttered, like we’re not trying to sort of throw everything at the page all at once. You know, I think from my perspective here, this is sort of one of the more kind of rich search results pages you would see on DuckDuckGo. You’ve got the news module down below. You’ve got some kind of imagery within the organic links. And that’s about it. You know, I guess from a design standpoint, how do you kind of see the role of just like the information layout and kind of how much we’re showing on the page at a time.

Karl: Yeah, that’s a good question. I’m a huge clean freak when it comes to design as well. It’s kind of hard trying to walk the line because when we talk to people who use the search engine, we’ll try to understand, how do you feel about the page they’re presenting? Especially if we try and compare to anyone else, what do you think about it? And we always get kind of mixed results, I guess, because some people love a nice clean layout. Some people want to see loads of stuff because they’re just so used to being bombarded with richness of like images here, there and everywhere. And one of the biggest challenges is that we obviously want to meet people where they are. We want to help give them what they’re looking for, but we don’t want to go to the kind of degree that we just say like, we’ll absolve all responsibility and just give you everything that’s available. Like here’s every image and every kind of video and stuff’s auto playing and like just taking up all of your space. Like for me, like you said, this current SERP that we’re looking at is this layout of the page. Like this is very rich for us. And it’s like at that kind of point of balance where I think we are okay with it. And we’re like, that’s good. But you know, if we imagined that Search Assist also had an image at this point as well and other things in there, it starts to make it really difficult for somebody to figure out like, where does my eye need to go, what do I need to look at in this particular point? So we’re trying to kind of keep it really clean and say, you know, cast is this most important piece right now. That’s you’ve got big images, big module, and then we kind of de-prioritize as you go further down. But it is probably one of the hardest challenges and it’s why whenever we’re developing a module like this, it’s not the kind of thing that we can develop in isolation. You know, you can’t sit in a Figma file just with this design of a flat version of a cast module and be like, you know, that looks great. I love it. Because the minute you put it in the SERP, you realize, you know, okay, I’ve got to deal with all of these other visual things and maybe we need to turn some stuff off or change something. And that’s I think, you know, being a design engineer here, it made it possible when we developing these entertainment modules for me to do that. So I was given the kind of the rope to get into the code base and start to put these things in a SERP and play with them. And I guess you just, you get a different feel for what works and what doesn’t work when you actually see it in real place in the code base.

Greg: Yeah, definitely. I’ll also add, similar to the Search Assist setting, we have a setting that lets you basically turn the instant answers off if that’s what you want to, recognizing that some people like more and some people want less. Although I think in a lot of cases, we see users keeping them on and finding a lot of value in them. I’m curious, as we maybe get towards wrapping up our conversation, putting your user hat on for a minute. What are the instant answers that you use the most?

Karl: Well, I will say that I use my entertainment ones all the time, of course, but that’s also just as a kind of, I guess, a curious person who works on them. I have to keep an eye on them. Search Assist is obviously one of my, again, most frequently used, but I think conversions is a surprising one that I use a lot, and I think that’s especially the case because being from the UK but working with a lot of my American colleagues, when people are just chatting about Fahrenheit, I have no idea. So I have to end up getting in there and converting that. But also great for time zones and things like that when you’re trying to figure out when you can do a meeting, you know, like this meeting, for example, I can jump into that. And then weather, again, like one of the simple things that just, it saves a ton of time when you’re already in a search engine doing other things, just pulling up the weather. IA is a super handy one. What about you? I feel like you’re gonna be a sports fan.

Greg: Yeah, well, we haven’t talked much about sports, but I do use the sports modules a lot. The sports ones are interesting because, you know, with something like conversions, you know, that’s pretty consistent as far as the queries we see day in, day out, people like looking for conversions. Sports is going to depend on, you know, the events that are happening, right? Our American football module is probably not triggering very much right now. But when the season starts in the fall, it’ll start showing again. And certainly, the day of the Super Bowl, it’ll be shown quite a lot. I’m a big Philadelphia sports fan. I have some queries bookmarked that I just look at pretty frequently. I find, personally, the instant answers for sports are actually kind of my favorite way to get some of this information. You know, if I’m looking for like the NHL standings and, you know, or kind of, you know, when do the Flyers play their next game or when did they play their last game? Like this search query is really quick for me to do. It loads quickly. I kind of know what all the information is here and where it’s going to be. So I find this pretty handy. And we’ve actually just this week, I think we’ve shipped some new sports. We’ve shipped Formula One, we’ve shipped NASCAR, and we’re planning to add a bunch more sports as well for people who want to get their sports information from DuckDuckGo. So yeah, I guess anything else we missed that we want to talk about before we wrap up?

Karl: I think we’ve covered pretty much everything, yeah, I can think of.

Greg: Yeah, I’m sure we could do future episodes deep dive into more. We didn’t talk about local at all, which is its own answer that has a lot of complexity to it. But yeah, I guess we can wrap up there. Thanks, Karl. This was fun.

Karl: Yeah, awesome, thanks.

Greg: All right, bye.

This episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Dave (Privacy team) discuss our tracker blocklist, how it works, and why most of it is open source.

Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) have been lightly edited for clarity. However, they may still contain some minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.

Beah: Hello and welcome to DuckTales where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss stories, technology and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode we talk about like something going on with our product or our company or our company vision and or how we operate and today we have our guest is Dave, who’s here to talk about the tracker block list. Hi, Dave.

Dave: Hey, Beah. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, sure thing. Yeah, my name is Dave Harbage. I’m a privacy engineer at DuckDuckGo. I primarily work on identifying privacy threats, building features to protect our users from these threats, and ensuring that we deliver a great web browsing experience.

Beah: Do you wanna introduce yourself briefly? That sounds very important, Dave.

Dave: Yeah, yeah, it’s a constant battle. It’s trying to keep up with the developing environment and give our users a good experience.

Beah: Thanks for fighting a good fight. So if I’ve hosted, if you’ve seen other DuckTales, you might have met me, but if you haven’t, I’m Beah and I am on the product team here. So yeah, let’s talk a bit about the tracker block list. First of all, what even is it?

Dave: Yeah, so our tracker block list is a list of domains and URLs that we found to exhibit what we call cross-site tracking behaviors. We use it in our browsers and browser extensions to block tracking requests and enhance the privacy of our users.

Beah: Sweet. So what’s the point of all that? Why did we even make this thing?

Dave: Yeah, so at DuckDuckGo, we believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. And we believe that people should have the option to live their lives without third parties recording their every move. We realized that protecting users’ privacy on our search engine was only half of the battle. As soon as users leave our search engine page to visit other websites, they’re subject to these third parties tracking their activities anywhere they go on the web. Pretty much. I think you might be shocked at just how many companies are involved in tracking your activity and also the granularity of the data that they’re collecting. For example, we’ve seen individual websites load hundreds of different tracking requests on a single page load. And it’s all hidden to the users. So we decided that we wanted to build a product that protects our users’ privacy not just when they’re searching, but when they’re browsing the web.

Beah: Yeah, do you know like approximately what portion of websites or maybe of web traffic is to a site with or to a page that has trackers on it?

Dave: I don’t have the exact number on the top of my head. It is...

Beah: I feel like the last I looked at the data, which was a little while ago, was like something on the order of 90%.

Dave: Yeah, it’s up there. It’s apps that you install on your phone. It’s websites that you visit in a browser. It’s incredibly prevalent everywhere.

Beah: Yeah, so basic premise here, like I mean I’m sure there’s a lot of people listening who like know this in their sleep, but then for those who don’t, it’s like as you move around the web, there may be these hidden trackers that have no explicit connection to the site itself. Google specifically is on just a ton of pages on the internet. So you’re on some random website, like a community, maybe the school your child goes to or something like that. And Google is actually there watching what you do in some sense, collecting data on your behaviors.

Dave: Yeah, that’s exactly right. There are many different reasons that websites add these third parties to their pages. Sometimes it’s for analytics, sometimes it’s for advertising. But they all are collecting this information about what you’re looking at, how you’re interacting with the page. And it’s all being sent back to these third parties. It’s not even the site that you’re browsing. It’s not clear that they’re getting this information.

Beah: Yeah, got it. So how does that relate to ad blocking?

Dave: So in the general sense, what we offer is not an ad blocker. A lot of the open web is supported by ad revenue, and we’re really not out to destroy that business model. It does, however, block ads that track you. So as I mentioned earlier, a lot of these ads are actually phoning home about your activities. They’re either saying, this user lingered on this ad or they had their mouse over it or they’re on this page, it might be kind of personal. And anytime we detect that kind of behavior, we block that. I think a lot of people just don’t really realize that these ads that they’re seeing aren’t just static images or videos. They’re also data collection apparatuses.

Beah: Yeah, yeah, so we didn’t set out to build an ad blocker, but because a lot of the code that generates ads or that serves ads on a website has tracking in it, we block it as a consequence of blocking that tracking code. And I notice this personally, like if I use a different browser, I’m often surprised at a lot of sites that I go to on the regular. I’m like, in other browsers, these start halfway down the page because there’s this huge ad at the top.

Dave: Yep. Yep.

Beah: So, okay, this tracker block list, we built this, are we using somebody else’s data or did we build this in-house?

Dave: Yes, we built this entirely in-house. When we first started going down this path, we looked at the existing lists, and they didn’t quite meet our needs. So there are a lot of different open source lists out there. But what we found was that it wasn’t always clear why certain domains were on these lists and why other domains weren’t on these lists. That leaves some room for bias potentially, whether intentionally or unintentionally. In order to offer a good product to our users, we really wanted to build a fully objective tracker list. It’s built on real-time activity observed across the web so that any time there’s a tracker in our block list, if someone were to ask, why is that in there, we can tell them exactly why that’s in there.

Beah: Yeah, so actually, do you want to say what the criteria is? What would be the answer to that? How do we decide if something’s a tracker?

Dave: Sure, yeah. So every month, the way that we do this is we crawl hundreds of thousands of websites from all over the world. And we look at the behaviors that are exhibited by the third party requests or third party scripts that are on the page. When we’re trying to determine if something is a cross-site tracker, we focus on really a few key criteria. So the first one is, is it setting cookies or is it storing something locally that then could be accessed to track your activity across websites? The second one is, is it accessing browser APIs that are commonly used to create what’s called a fingerprint of your browser or device? So that might be checking to see how much memory your computer has or what kind of CPU you have or the width of your screen or the pixel density of your screen. A lot of tracking happens that way where they gather all the entropy from all of these different signals and they create what’s called a fingerprint of your device. And then they can uniquely identify you just by comparing that fingerprint across different sites.

Beah: Mm-hmm.

Dave: The third criteria is we look for things that are present on many different independent sites so that we have a lower threshold for what we consider to be a cross-site tracker.

Beah: Gotcha. Do you want to talk about are there any interesting challenges, like either technical or user-facing challenges that we’ve encountered in building out this block list?

Dave: Yeah, absolutely. So the first one is tracking techniques are evolving. So as we develop a better tracker identification method, these tracking companies see that we’re doing that, or they see that others are doing that. And they devise very clever ways to evade that and make it look like they’re not tracking so they don’t get blocked. So we have to continuously update our detection techniques to stay ahead of them. And then I think the most important issue that we run into is making sure that the web works. Because a lot of websites, what they’ve done is they’ve integrated these tracking companies in a way such that if you block those tracking companies from loading, the site often doesn’t work. We’ve developed a very efficient process for reviewing these breakage reports that we get from users. So in our browsers, anytime you hit a site and it’s not working right, you can report that to us. And then we take all those reports, we look at them, we figure out what’s going on. Is this real breakage? And we fix it. And we do that, I think, pretty efficiently at this point. Most of the time we can get things working within a few days.

Beah: Nice. So how, if any listeners are in counter breakage, what exactly should they do to report it to us, our broken site?

Dave: Yeah, so there’s two different ways to do it for our browsers. The first way is you can open the privacy dashboard. There’s a little green, we call it a duck foot icon in the address bar. It’s on the left side. Many people might think it’s a shield. It’s actually a duck foot. If you click that, it’ll open up and it’ll give you like an overview of the privacy of the website.

Beah: It’s both. It’s a shield and a duck foot.

Dave: And there’s a little link there that you can click to submit a broken site report. You can also just submit a broken site report from the primary browser menu in all of our browsers. Yeah, and those come straight to us. And our team reviews them and make sure that everything is working as expected.

Beah: Got it. So if you want the protection of our block list, have to get that. Just going to DuckDuckGo and searching isn’t going to give you the... We can’t use our block list to intervene if you’re in somebody else’s browser, unless you’re in a DuckDuckGo browser or you’ve installed our extension, right? Okay. So if you’re listening and you want this...

Dave: That’s right. That’s right.

Beah: all the benefits of this block list that Dave works hard on. Go install our browsers or extension and then report it when you run into a broken site, if you even do, because again, Dave is working hard to make sure that you don’t. Nice. Okay. So most of this tracking kind of happens behind the scenes. You can’t actually see it happening. Is there a way that users can understand what’s actually going on?

Dave: Yeah, absolutely. We show in our browsers, when you visit a web page, we’ll show a little animation in the address bar that shows the trackers that are being blocked. And then if you click into the privacy dashboard, the duck foot or shield icon, you can see a full list of every tracker that we’ve identified along with the company that it belongs to and a lot more information about the status of the web page, like the security of the site, the privacy practices of the site.

Beah: Yeah, it’s pretty wild. If you haven’t done this already, go to your favorite news site and click around and then click on the Duckfoot Shield and you can just see sometimes dozens of companies. Sometimes Google’s off in there, but sometimes there’s companies you’ve never even heard of that are on the site. It’s pretty wild.

Dave: Yeah, it’s crazy, especially the ones you’ve never heard of, because it’s not always clear what they’re doing with the data. I think some of the big advertising companies, they’re obviously using it to better target you with ads or different content. But some of these lesser known ones, they actually bundle up this data, create a profile of you, and then they sell it to the highest bidder, which is pretty scary.

Beah: Okay. Yeah. Okay, so maybe just before we wrap up, there anything that we haven’t touched on that you want to mention, Dave?

Dave: Most of this stuff is open source, so all of the tools that we use to build our tracker block list, they’re all open source. You can find them and you can use them. They exist on github.com. That’s G-I-T-H-U-B.com slash DuckDuckGo slash tracker hyphen radar. We actually have a few different. Yeah.

Beah: Maybe we can put that in the show. I was like, they can spell GitHub. And I was like, okay, this is getting complicated.

Dave: Yeah. So we have a few different places in our GitHub where we have open sourced all of this. And we’ve actually found that some cutting edge researchers have been using a crawler to find different risks online. It’s pretty good. We try to be as responsive as possible when somebody is trying to use it and has an issue or has a question about why something works the way it does. Yeah. Hit us up.

Beah: Yeah, directly contributing to DuckDuckGo’s mission of raising the standard of trust online.

Dave: That’s right.

Beah: That seems like a good note to end on, so thank you very much, Dave. Appreciate it. And see you around the hood.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah, thank you, Beah. Thanks.

Beah: Later.

Curious how people voted? Head to VoteYesOrNoAI.com

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.

Kamyl: Hello and welcome to DuckTales where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode you’ll hear from the employees about our product vision, product updates, engineering, approach to AI, et cetera. I’m Kamyl Bazbaz, SVP for communications and policy at DuckDuckGo. Today I’m with Mary McGee, one of our senior brand directors and I’m very excited to talk about something that we worked on together, which is our Yes AI No AI campaign that just launched. Mary, do you want to introduce yourself and then we’ll start talking about the campaign.

Mary: Yeah. Hi, Kamyl. Great intro. So good. I, like Kamyl said, I work on brand here at DuckDuckGo. I’ve been here about six years and I’ve worked on everything from our homepage to onboarding to messaging, all basically, how does it feel to use DuckDuckGo? How does it feel to use the product? What are we trying to communicate to you, our users and the types of conversations we’re looking to have? So I’m excited to talk about this one. It’s a sort of a new effort on our side, which hopefully we’ll see a lot more of.

Kamyl: That’s right. So I guess let’s let’s start from the basics. What is the no yes campaign and what are we asking people to do?

Mary: Yep. So this is our live public vote on AI and where it came from. Actually, it started probably back over the summer. So, you know, a lot of users will know that we’ve had a version of our search engine, noai.duckduckgo.com for maybe the past six months. And we built it as we were building our AI tools because something that was really important to us was that AI be optional. And that actually, comes from this sort of long history of DuckDuckGo really prioritizing user choice and wanting to let users decide how and when and how much, you know, you’ll notice that throughout all of our products. But when it came to NoAI, we noticed that there was something to this. There was, was, you know, it was getting used, people were talking about it. And it kind of sparked this conversation of like, you know, we believe optionality is, you know, inherent in good technology and letting users make that choice. But we noticed with AI, people really aren’t being given that choice. It’s like every time you see, you got a new email about a new feature or a new product, they talk about their new AI integration. And there’s no talk about how to turn it off. There’s no talk about, you were asking for it, here it is. There’s this sort of like, there’s this real gap between user demand and what companies were releasing. And so, like I mentioned, when we were thinking about AI, we were thinking about useful, private, optional, and there’s something about optional that really stuck out. So that’s where this campaign came from. What we wanted to do was actually ask, a thing that tech companies don’t often do, actually ask people, hey, where do you stand on AI? What is your take? What do you want? And we asked in really a simple way because for us, we sort of can help you either way. If you’re yes AI and you’re like looking to try AI chats or AI summaries, we can help you. We have a private version of ChatGPT. We have search summaries. That’s the yes AI experience. But if you’re no AI and you just feel like AI is being built for someone else’s vision of the future and you’re not represented in these products, we have a no AI version where we take it out and we even go further and remove AI imagery. And so really where this came from was we feel like optionality and choice matter. And so we wanted to create a public vote to help make the case that so do you, so does everyone. Like fundamentally, even if you love AI, you probably want the choice over when and how you use it. And so the idea is to get people to vote, show where they stand, explain why, and all resulting in the idea that like this should be optional. People should have the choice. And that’s what we’re hoping to find and create more of a conversation about.

Kamyl: One of my favorite things about the campaign are the updated landing pages that we made on yesai.duckduckgo.com and noai.duckduckgo.com with decks in the middle and a very clear no or yes AI. And so I’m wondering how that came together and what was the creative development around that.

Mary: Yeah, the it was actually the first thing we did like before we even decided on the vote or the billboards or anything else we’ll talk about today. It started with these pages because we fundamentally were like, this is the point. This is giving users choices is the representation of it. And so the idea was like, how can you create it a very simple experience? That’s very clear. I think there’s a version of this where you just disable the AI features or enable them and leave it at that. But we wanted these. We wanted to really reassure people about which experience they’re in and make that really clear. So that’s where, you know, just really leaning on the no and yes and the big bold, making sure you knew which experience you were in was really important. And I wouldn’t be surprised if this is something we like continue to think through and find the best way to make sure we’re like serving both sides of this conversation.

Kamyl: Yeah, I think you sort of touched on this already, but I think one of the things that I really liked about this campaign from the start is that it felt like something only DuckDuckGo could do. We pride ourselves on optionality. It’s sort of part of our legacy. You should be able to choose privacy. You should be able to choose the default search engine. That’s been a cornerstone of our advocacy for a long time. And as we know, Google, for example, doesn’t give their users an easy way to turn off AI if there’s really an option at all. And so this felt like something that DuckDuckGo had a really unique and credible position to take.

Mary: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, speaking specifically of the kind of like no AI side of this, there are many people who want to opt out of these features, you know, and they are really not being given this option. We really felt like people deserve that level of choice. And it just feels like there’s this big group of people just getting ignored right now. And so some of this was both to acknowledge that and make sure they felt like they had, they could use the internet like they want and also create a conversation online and space for them because it’s nobody’s sort of mark talking to this group. You know, some are, but just not quite in this way.

Kamyl: So this, you know, people will watch this interview next week. The campaign will have concluded by then. Right now, it’s Wednesday, January 21st. We have over 85,000 votes. And if you want to talk about what the split has been or not split and sort of your reaction to that.

Mary: Yeah, so even from the beginning, it’s been pretty much like, I think since the beginning, it’s been like a 93% no AI to 7% yes AI. And it’s really maintained. Like we’ve been watching these graphs from the beginning just stay perfectly in parallel, which has been really fascinating. And I it’s really exciting. Like, you I think there’s been comments on social that’s like, is this what DuckDuckGo expected? You know, all we wanted was to create this conversation about what people want and what they expect from technology and what they’re asking for. Like, we don’t have an agenda. Like, we support optionality, which means we support creating experiences for what people want and serving them both. Really, there’s not, it’s really not about either side winning. That was never sort of the point. It was about creating a conversation about what people want and giving them this like opportunity to express it. The question is really simple, yes or no. And obviously the answers aren’t simple. You know, sometimes people are yes for some things and no for other things, but that’s what we were hoping people would talk about on social. Like take your yes and say what it meant to you. Or, you know, like I’m no, but yes in these ways. We have some creators participating as well. And that’s a lot of what they’re bringing to the conversation is like the nuance, the context, but for us, is like a, we’re really excited to see the conversations people have had. And this is just like exactly what we were hoping for is to create this like very clear stance that like what people are being provided is not what they want. And that fundamentally like from our perspective, that’s why we’re where we are promoting optionality. That’s why we believe that’s important.

Kamyl: I think it’s fascinating that we’re a company that gets to live inside of this sort of tension and conflict that, you know, we can spend so much time making noai.duckduckgo.com and have people get extremely excited about it and feel like someone is finally picking up for their point of view. While at the same time, we also have our own internal data from surveys and other research that you know, our AI assist feature, which, you know, uses AI to give, to really expand the number of instant answers, what folks on Google would call the knowledge panel answers, knowledge graph answers, expand those numbers significantly and makes the search experience better. So I think it’s so interesting that we can sort of do both, you know, use AI to improve our services and get good feedback on it and also give people the option to just not have it at all if that’s what they want.

Mary: It’s just so interesting that like, it’s that it’s revolutionary, you know, like, or that it’s so rare. Like, it feels like the most simple thing in the world to be like, here’s a new feature. If you don’t like it, you can turn it off. You know, we, you know, that’s been Gabriel’s, you know, our CEO and founders, like method from the beginning. Anytime we release something, he’ll ask, where is the off switch? You know, it’s like, how can we give that control? It’s just so strange in the era of like, all the algorithms and personalization, it’s like you used to be able to customize everything and now they’ve sort of assumed what the best experience was or taken everyone to the mean. And it’s funny to think of this as different when it so used to be the norm and we’re sort of maintaining that.

Kamyl: As this is DuckTales, and we have to go behind the curtain a little bit, one funny thing happened where noai.duckduckgo.com existed prior to this campaign. We just sort of updated it for the campaign itself. And it was discovered that we were having this vote before we even launched it this past Friday. You want to talk about that a little bit and what happens?

Mary: Yeah, well, you laid out what happened exactly. We ended up redesigning what noai.duckduckgo.com looked like, and there was a little Easter egg. Like if you hovered over the big logo, you could see a link to the vote. And so we ended up pushing that live to run some tests on what it looks like when you share on social, things like that. And it ended up getting discovered and shared on Blue Sky. Within, I think a, an hour or two, we had 10,000 votes, we had people engaging about it, lots of excitement and questions. What was really interesting about it is like, how can something like this live on its own? We had prepared social posts and Gabriel, our founder wrote a post about what this meant to us. But when you take back how we were framing it and you just brought this debate to people, which is what happened when it leaked. How do they interpret it? What do they do with it? How does it create conversation? What was really nice to see is the optionality point really did come through. I think it got, this question of yes or no, it being too simple, but understanding the different contexts as you want it and don’t. In many ways, I wouldn’t change how it happened because it was great to see it sort of embraced and like championed by the people we were trying to have the conversation for, and then it let us join the conversation actually in a funny way when we officially launched on Monday and bring it extended to other channels.

Kamyl: Yeah, I think by Monday, we basically had almost 50,000 votes with zero promotion on our part, which is not something we expected, but I think, yeah, it’s that we start the court.

Mary: Yeah, and it’s this conversation wanting to be happening or that is in many cases was already happening, but was creating like a different way of talking about it, accessing it.

Kamyl: Yeah, great. So before we wrap up our conversation here, I think we’ve covered everything. Just quick wrap-up on our questions for you, since again, we’re trying to pull back the curtain here. You’ve already said how long you worked here, six years. That’s many years in duck years. Why do you work here?

Mary: Where is this curtain? Where does the curtain exist?

Kamyl: You know, it’s private, except at the elementary, so it’s none of your business. So you already said how long you worked here, six years. That’s many years in duck years. Why do you work here?

Mary: Yeah, none of my business, none of my business, yeah, okay, yeah. I, well, it, know, this is an interesting story to share with you, Kamyl, because Kamyl and I actually worked together before DuckDuckGo and we worked at a consultancy. And so we worked with a lot of different, mainly tech clients across, you know, a lot of industries. And what I loved about DuckDuckGo was like, felt like you could be, actually we’re trying to make the internet better. Like it was a tech company that really was mission driven, but was also made, you know, researched back data decisions, you know, lot of the companies you see or products you see released are sort of, they don’t have long last, there’s not this like long lasting legacy to them. Like DuckDuckGo has been around since 2008 trying to do the same thing, you know, giving people who want more privacy a private real alternative. And as the internet changes, it’s new products, it’s AI or it’s browser or it’s app tracking protection, whatever it may be. It’s sort of stayed the course and remained that like steadfast company trying to do the right thing. And it just attracts a lot of people that are wanting to do the right thing and making it better. And that does, you just like, you know, we consult, I consulted with like dozens of companies and you just don’t. It is rarer than you think. And so that’s why I came and it’s what keeps me here is feeling like you’re still trying to make something better and that has a history of trying to make something better.

Kamyl: What’s something that surprises you about working here that people don’t know?

Mary: Hmm. I think the company is funnier than it seems sometimes. Know, I think the, obviously have a duck logo, Dax, but a lot of what you’ve seen coming from us has been a lot more about like privacy education or things like that. And so what we’re trying to do over, you know, is, what I’m really trying to do is like sort of unleash the like personality that is so real about the people that work here. Everyone is like, it’s such a good sense of humor. The company is quirky. It’s like full of people that have this sort of like quirky fun personality. And so showing that more and making that more of what your, like the user’s experience is with us. It might surprise you to hear that. And I think we’ll hopefully see a lot more of it.

Kamyl: Thank you, Mary. That was really great. So where can people go to check out this campaign before we wrap up?

Mary: Yes. Okay, you can do the link up here. I’m just kidding. You can go to voteyesornoai.com or check out any of our social feeds. We have links posted of where you can go.

Kamyl: Thank you, Mary. Thanks for everyone for tuning in and reading DuckTales. See you next time.

Mary: Thanks, see ya, bye Kamyl.

In this episode, Beah (SVP, Product) and Omid (Product) discuss Duck Player, how it’s private, and how to use it.

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: Duck Player is available in all DuckDuckGo browsers. When you click on a YouTube video either within YouTube or our Search results, you’ll be asked if you want to view in Duck Player.

Beah: Hello and welcome to DuckTales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build 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. In this episode, you’ll hear about a feature called... Oh, Omid, do you want to say it?

Omid: Duck Player

Beah: And I’m Beah Burger-Lenahan. If you’ve been watching DuckTales, you’ve maybe met me already. I’m on the product team here, but you probably haven’t met Omid, so Omid, why don’t you introduce yourself?

Omid: Hello, my name is Omid. I’m also on the product team. Been at DuckDuckGo for a little over four years and have worked on a lot of our browser stuff, including email protection, our password manager, and Duck Player, which we’re talking about today.

Beah: Sweet. So why don’t you start us off by just explaining what Duck Player is.

Omid: Yeah, in a nutshell, Duck Player is a more private way to watch YouTube videos with fewer ads and with no distractions. I can, I think, do a screen share and kind of show you that in action, fingers crossed if this works.

Beah: This is actually our second time starting this episode because the first time it didn’t work.

Omid: Yeah. So here’s our browser. I’ve got a couple of tabs open. There’s really two main ways to get to Duck Player. If you’re on YouTube and you click on a video, we’ll ask you if you want to watch in Duck Player or No Thank You, which we just watch in right on YouTube as you would normally expect. So if I turn on Duck Player, it opens in a new tab and the video just starts playing.

Beah: Okay.

Omid: You have the option to always open these videos in Duck Player. You could always get back to YouTube with this button to watch on YouTube, but it’s just your video, nothing else. And all of the personalized ads are gone. So I can kind of go into like maybe some of the details about how that works, if that sounds good.

Beah: Yeah, and actually maybe before that, can you just tell people how do they even get Duck Player?

Omid: Yeah, so Duck Player is available in all of our browsers, so Mac OS, Windows, iOS, and Android. And by default, when you load a video, you’re going to get asked that question if you want to use Duck Player, whether you’re on YouTube and you have this question here, which you can also remember your choice, or if you’re on search and click on a YouTube video. We’re also going to ask you if you want to watch it on YouTube or watch it in Duck Player.

Beah: Got it. Okay, yeah, let’s talk. Tell me a little bit about why we build it and what problem it solves.

Omid: Yeah, so we built it as a feature that launched, I guess I could stop sharing screen now, a feature that, it’s still on my screen and it’s there and I know exactly what’s happening. But Duck Player was a kind of a marquee feature of our Mac OS browser launch. This was, I think a bit over three years ago.

Beah: You don’t want to though. You want to keep watching the Bad Bunny Tiny Desk. Okay, you’re watching. You’re not even listening to what you’re saying.

Omid: We did some research, or at least I think found some third party research about people’s usage in browsers, what they use them for, particularly on desktop and video consumption, specifically on YouTube was a huge use case. And so we wanted to be able to have something that made doing those things more private, because that means more people have more privacy protections. And it was also a differentiator for our browser launch as we were getting into the desktop browser space because we’ve had the mobile apps for a little while and Mac OS was our first desktop browser launch.

Beah: Yeah. Yeah. And if I recall correctly, you know, we’d been also doing a bunch of research on ad blocking and learned that the, the one of the spaces, maybe the space where people were most annoyed by, creeped out by ads was video and Duck Player doesn’t show, like you don’t get targeted ads when you’re using Duck Player.

Omid: Yeah, yeah, so the way that it works is that YouTube offers this privacy enhanced mode for any embedded video. So if you see like a YouTube video embedded on the web, the person who’s implementing that, making that webpage that has the YouTube video on it can turn on this privacy enhanced mode, but it’s optional and you have to opt into it and I assume not many people do.

Beah: Okay.

Omid: And so what Duck Player works is we have this special page that loads in the browser and the video you’re trying to watch gets embedded into that special page and we turn on this privacy enhanced mode. And within privacy enhanced mode, we found in our testing that there’s been almost no ads at all and nearly all the ads have not shown up there, but YouTube specifically says that there’s no personalized ads that get shown there. It’s coming from a different domain that uses different cookies entirely and so all the personalization stuff actually can’t happen technically because it’s doing this special privacy stuff, which is nice.

Beah: Sweet. And I should have asked this earlier, but I mean, do I have to pay to use Duck Player?

Omid: No, you do not. It is entirely free. It’s actually the same technology that we have within our videos vertical on search. So even if you’re not in our browsers, we offer a private way to watch videos if you’re in the videos tab on the search results page. And that uses the exact same thing where we have this privacy enhanced mode for the embedded video. But for the full experience, you’ll be able to get like the full distraction free watching that’s within our browsers. And that’s a free feature.

Beah: Got it. Cool, do you have any favorite things personally about Duck Player?

Omid: I have a five-year-old daughter. I think the example that you saw on the search was like a how to draw a Hello Kitty character video. And so exactly if there was a Spotify Wrapped for those video searches it’d be Hello Kitty, K-pop, Demon Hunters. But like I’m very conscious of the content and the amount of videos that my five year old is exposed to and watches. And so if you just loaded the YouTube homepage, you’re kind of inundated with like all these recommendations and different things that are thrown at you. And after you watch, when you’re watching a video, you have a side rail of all these videos. After you watch the video, it’s like, here’s more, or it’ll autoplay to the next one. And so if I’m just trying to show my daughter how to draw a Hello Kitty in a video, we load that in Duck Player. We watch only the video and it’s done. And it’s like the perfect use case for that.

Beah: Nice. That’s a pretty good one. Tell me about have there been any particular challenges or surprises along the way as you’ve built Duck Player?

Omid: I think the biggest challenge, it kind of continues to be a little bit of a challenge, is that not all, not 100% of videos can be viewed in Duck Player. If you’re a YouTube creator and you upload a video, there’s an option that you can say that you don’t want to allow your videos to be embedded, and that includes anywhere. So if someone was trying to add your video to their own website, they couldn’t do it, and Duck Player is included in that. And then there’s also some age-restricted content and the way that YouTube does age verification is you have to log in to your account to verify your age. And because it’s on an entirely separate domain that the privacy enhanced mode gets served from that kind of breaks the entire like privacy and personalization stuff. So there’s some small amount of videos that cannot be loaded in Duck Player for those reasons. We estimate it to be somewhere around like 3% ish on desktop. And it’s unfortunate, but we also allow people to go to YouTube and there’s a number of other use cases where you might want to go to YouTube to you know subscribe to the channel, like view the comments or something so it’s purely complementary to it and that was a challenge to communicate why people couldn’t watch those videos when that small amount does happen.

Beah: Did we try any ways of getting around those limitations or just kind of there’s nothing you can do?

Omid: Yeah, for the ones where it’s just not allowed to be embedded, there’s really nothing we can do. Another category is some YouTube bot detection. They do some pretty sophisticated things, we suspect, trying to determine if you’re a bot or not. And if some combination of those things get triggered, they’ll ask you to also log in to verify that you’re not a bot. And so we’ve tried to look into ways that we can try to get around some of that, too. But it’s really, really tricky and complicated. And so our messaging is right now to you can go to YouTube and watch it. And if there’s ways in the future we can improve that, we’ll certainly do it. But we’re trying to just at least communicate it really well to people so they understand what’s going on.

Beah: Have you ever been submitting multiple Hello Kitty queries repeatedly and been blocked as a bot?

Omid: I haven’t yet, if I was YouTube’s detection algorithm, I would probably flag that considering the volume.

Beah: Yeah, yeah, I would flag that. Cool, okay. So tell me, like, are there anything, we launched the first version of Duck Player quite a while ago, like, anything significant that we’ve changed about it along the way?

Omid: The biggest thing I would say is probably on mobile. We launched Duck Player on mobile a bit after the desktop launch. And one of the things that we learned there as we were doing some testing was that, as you saw when I demoed it, you get this question in the video. It says, like, do you want to turn on Duck Player? And when we were on mobile with the smaller screen and it taking up a bigger percentage of that, we learned that people kind of don’t really know where that message is coming from, or they maybe confuse that message to be coming from somewhere else, like it’s coming from YouTube itself or coming from the video or it’s an ad itself because they see ads in that space so frequently. And so on iOS in particular, we actually made a change where we made that prompt be more attached to the browser UI so that when we ask you if you want to use Duck Player, it’s out of the way. And we kind of make sure that we’re not like interrupting people or that it’s clearer to them that this is coming from DuckDuckGo. It’s a feature you can do, you can watch it in Duck Player if you want to, and if you don’t want to, it’s not blocking you in a lot of ways.

Beah: Yeah, yeah, I personally much prefer the iOS version. Check it out if you have an iOS device. Cool. Yeah, anything that we haven’t touched on that you want to add?

Omid: I mentioned the constant recommendations and YouTube kind of throwing more and more videos at you. One thing I think I maybe had glossed over was if you watch videos in Duck Player, those views don’t get fed into your YouTube history and therefore your algorithm and more recommendations. So it’s another privacy benefit of using Duck Player as well.

Beah: Nice. Okay, wait, I have one more question. Recommend one, only one video on the entirety of YouTube that users who want to go test out Duck Player should look up and watch.

Omid: On the spot, just like that. It’s hard for me to argue against the Bad Bunny Tiny Desk Concert that I just pulled up, but I will also say, if you go to any of those NPR Tiny Desk Concerts, I would be shocked if you didn’t have some artists that you knew. There’s been so many of them on there, so find a Tiny Desk Concert and watch that. It’s fantastic.

Beah: Nice. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Omid. It was a pleasure talking with you about Duck Player.

Omid: Yeah, thank you. Likewise.

Beah: We’ll be back again for some other topic in the future.

Omid: Sounds good. Thanks, Beah.

Beah: Alright. Later.

In this episode, Gabriel (Founder) and Ewa (Product) discuss Search Assist, why we’re so focused on letting users control their experience, and future improvements.

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: Learn more about the “More” button in Search Assist here.

Gabriel Hello everybody, welcome to DuckTales. I’m Gabriel, founder of DuckDuckGo. With me is Ewa. You wanna introduce yourself, Ewa?

Ewa Hi everyone, I’m Ewa Sobula. I’m a product person at DuckDuckGo based in Poland.

Gabriel Cool, we are going to talk about search assist today. We’ve done one episode before when we introduced the more button. This is the stuff on the top of search results where our anonymous AI is answering queries for you and you can click more, but we’re gonna go take a step back and just kind of talk about the feature in general. ⁓ As a precursor, I’ve said this a bunch of times. at AI episodes, but ⁓ our guiding principles for AI features are that they’re useful, private, and optional. in this case, and I know people really appreciate that, ⁓ we think Search Assist is extremely useful, and we’ll get into that, but it is also optional. So you can turn it off if you like. It’s really easy to do so. There’s toggles actually within Search Assist itself, but also in the browser and search settings. And of course, it’s private like the rest of our search results. It’s completely anonymous. ⁓ So with that, yeah, let’s just jump from the highest level. What is Search Assist and how does it work?

Ewa So as you mentioned, search assist is our AI generated instant answer to search queries that we show up on top of search results page. Once we are confident that this is gonna be the optimal answer to use a query, meaning for queries where you either ask a question or really are looking for a quick summary. And ⁓ we are now showing it on like roughly quarter of our searches and we are using LLMs to create the answer but what is important is that we actually grounded in the right sources and like verified and checked sources so it’s not like generated literally and just by an LLM but we find the relevant sources to the search query. we analyze them and we synthesize the concise one, two sentences also that we show on top of SERP when it’s really relevant. Or we also show like lower down the page where you might have different intent. ⁓ But still it could be useful if it’s something that you scroll down to.

Gabriel Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ And I want to get into the, you mentioned it being concise and that’s one of the main differences I feel we have with Google and I want to get into a bunch of those. ⁓ before we do that, let’s continue with the basics. I so I actually started working on this feature. Maybe people think it was in reaction to Google or something, but it wasn’t. We actually started working on this as soon as Chat TV came out. ⁓ to really initially focus on Wikipedia and helping, know, giving people better Wikipedia answers, which you mentioned, search exists now appears in about 25 % of searches, Wikipedia appears around about 10%. So, and we had gotten lots of feedback over the years that, hey, it’d be great, you’re showing me the beginning of Wikipedia, but it’d be great if you could just show me the answer from Wikipedia. And we had tried that in different ways and we accomplished that somewhat, but until LMS came along where we could really pull back the paragraphs of Wikipedia and ask the LMP to pull out the answer within that paragraph, which is much better than just showing the paragraph and making you find it. We weren’t really able to unlock search assist. So yeah, we started working on it right when ChatGPD came out and kind of rushed to Wikipedia. And then I know you got involved later. when we started adding lots of other sources. And as you mentioned, we’re trying to use the best sources we can. ⁓ But I’d say more broadly, given that it’s kind of a broader thing than Wikipedia now, what do you see the problem that it’s solving in search results, just kind of for at large? Like you mentioned, sometimes you put it on top, sometimes you put it on the bottom. Obviously, that’s a choice. we’re putting on top because we think it’s solving a search problem,

Ewa So think the key problem is that it’s short that we’re solving with assist is that it shortens the path from when you know what you want to ask and you formulate a query and to actually finding what you’re looking for. And to your point, we’ve already been doing Wikipedia or other modules in the past and we’re still doing them for many of the searches. But Assist allows us to cover more of these informational queries, including the long tail ones, meaning people use different language to ask Search Engine about what they’re looking for. And with Assist, we’ve been able to understand more of these natural language queries or queries that really ever are asked only once to a Search Engine, which is a huge portion of search queries. And, but we still can understand them and can present an answer that is like good enough to answer what you’re really looking for. But also with the more button that you’ve already mentioned also allows you to dig deeper and get more information on demand while still keeping you in the search engine context. In the context that a lot of people are familiar with because we’ve been using it for years, years, some of us ever since they were born. And so it’s kind of like bridges the gap between the value that LLMs bring and how they can enrich the experience of finding information ⁓ without having to move to a totally different user interface, to move to more like conversational chat experiences. It’s still search results that are familiar. It’s the search results that these answers are grounded for. but we’re making use of this technology to present it in a more suitable way for larger volume of different types people ask search engine.

Gabriel Yeah, and so maybe I summarize that way. It really is saving people time. And I think as a primary benefit, I think as a secondary benefit in aligning with our vision of Raise a Standout Trust Online is that we’re trying to ⁓ understand what is the best information in the search results and surface that for you in a concise way. ⁓ So that not only saves you time, but it on average should be giving you better information higher up on the page, ⁓ which is kind of really what you want in a search engine. And just to restate for people who really don’t want AI, you can turn it off. However, this is not to your point earlier, AI making up the answer. This is us grounding the answer on actual search pages that were crawling in real time to look for that answer for you. And then the sources are ⁓ annotated there, which you can click through ⁓ and both check and read more information because we’re only giving you a concise summary. So if you want more, you click through. ⁓ So with that in mind, how you mentioned the more button in the UX before we kind of dive into kind of differences. ⁓ What is the general user reaction been like over time with search assist?

Ewa ⁓ So we’ve been getting a lot of really positive reactions from our users. Assist has been like one of the highest rated parts of search experience historically at DuckDuckGo. And ⁓ I think what people usually appreciate is both that it saves time, it gives this concise answer. The fact that it’s really concise and it’s not like taking over your search experience is just there when you need it but still doesn’t make it hard to get to organics if that’s what you’re looking for. It’s another thing that people have appreciated. ability to drill down to sources, as you’ve mentioned, is also something we’ve heard been ⁓ getting like really good reception. And we are using the feedback we’re getting from people a lot in improving assist. On one hand, that’s because we really don’t track our users. We have very little information about how people interact with our search results. So we really rely on when people make effort to click thumbs up, click thumbs down, leave some additional comment. We use this information both in automated way to improve our answers and also we really do read through them and take lessons and figure out how we can continue improving assist, which is for instance how we’ve gotten the more button.

Gabriel Yeah, I mean, so that seems like a big difference from Google right there for what it’s worth. I mean, I guess I’m not inside Google, so I don’t know, but from reading comments on Hacker News and other places, it does not necessarily seem like they read every piece of feedback, ⁓ but we actually do. And so ⁓ that really is a distinction. ⁓ We mentioned some others too. ⁓ So I mentioned that it was optional. I think we should clarify now that it’s not just you can turn it on or off, which you can. But you can also change the frequency of when search assist appears. We have often and sometimes, as well as on demand. So you can basically make it so it doesn’t show up automatically, but if you want to click on it, you can still click the search assist button on the underneath the search box and it’ll show just for when you want it on demand. And if you really, really don’t want it, including not even seeing that button on the page, you can ⁓ get rid of that. So that’s another one.

Ewa Yes.

Gabriel Another one that you mentioned, so the conciseness, I think, you know, does a couple things. One, it means that the less information there is, the less kind of surface area there is for making stuff up or getting stuff wrong. ⁓ But also, what you had just mentioned, it just takes up less space on the page. So I think some complaints that people have about Google’s A.O. overviews is they really are just taking up. You can’t see the organic links, they’re taking up too much of the page. We’re really keeping it ⁓ tight. And the way we’re doing that is we’re kind of forcing it to be small, but also to your point, we have the more button there as an option, but we’re not starting out with that long explanation. We’re starting out with this ⁓ concise explanation. Is there anything else you want to highlight in terms of kind of differences between us and Google? ⁓ If not, I can probably come up with something else.

Ewa Maybe like building on top of what you just talked about is I ⁓ think what what I can tell about our philosophy of building assist which I think also applies to the whole of search is that We like to give control to our to our users. We trust that they know they can own their experience, which is why we’re giving you search results, which some of it is assist. You get the organics, you get other modules, none of these experiences is like overly dominating the search results page. And you can kind of like choose your own adventure, which I think is... Again, I’m not in Google. I don’t know exactly how decisions are made in there, but from my observation is like different approach to how we give control versus deciding for the user what they should be seeing when they search for a specific topic query.

Gabriel Yeah, that’s a great point. I mean, I would even build on that, which is we’ve also been giving control to publishers. There are some publishers who don’t ⁓ want to be part of AI results. ⁓ We are trying our best to make the click through rate actually pretty decent because we have a short summary. And so really, if you want more, you click through and the links are prominent. Like on Google, sometimes they’re hidden actually behind the click and on DuckDuckGo they’re not. More fundamentally in that if you do want to opt out, we have a kind of way for publishers to just opt out of the AI summaries ⁓ via robots.txt ⁓ and still appear totally fine in search results. Whereas Google has been trying to bundle those things together and basically force you to opt out of Google altogether. ⁓ So that’s another decently big difference in line with control. ⁓ OK, so yeah, what’s What’s next? What are the negative feedback complaints we’re getting? And what are we working on? Where are we going?

Ewa Yes.

Ewa So ⁓ one of the things that we continue working on and we will... is that we want to keep the high bar for answers quality. There are still cases where we get the answer wrong, it’s not incorrect or maybe the sources weren’t right or we misinterpret the query. The percent of these incorrect answers is really low but we, as I said, we want to really take correctness seriously. So we’re working to add even more loops, both with user feedback, observing the queries, especially the fresh ones, like trending topics. This is where information changes really often and we want assist to always give you the fresh and correct answer. So definitely answer quality is something that we will continue working on. ⁓ We also are moving to other languages besides English, as it has been available in English for a while already. That hasn’t been true for other languages, so it’s already available in Italy for some queries. We’re only rolling it down. You’ll start seeing it rather further down the page before we build enough confidence to show it on top of your results, but you can already start seeing it there. And we plan to roll out to ⁓ a few next languages which are gonna be Spanish, Dutch, French, German and we won’t stop there but this is like the current focus which ⁓ I’m personally excited about because yeah it’s...

Gabriel sure a lot of team members are. have, I mean, this is for InterObject.co, we have people, I think, across like 30-something countries now, and a lot of them are not English as their first language. And I think they would prefer to have non-English ⁓ search assist answers. So that’s exciting.

Ewa Absolutely, but also our users. I think we know that people all over the world are using DuckDuckGo search and I personally can’t wait to have them use assist and also get benefits of these short and concise answers. And we’re also looking into improving and expanding or continue improving the user experience of assist. We’ve been already mentioning the more button a few times. We know that there are sometimes different expectations people have when clicking more buttons. Sometimes it’s really you want to have the longer version of the answer, but sometimes it’s more like you want to do more information or additional thing that wasn’t mentioned, the concise answer. Or maybe you want to drill down, more like learn about related things. So we’re now looking into exploring these options and making sure that expand answers are really helpful depending on what you’re looking for.

Gabriel Cool, I know we’re also always trying to speed things up. ⁓ reducing latency, getting answered faster, it’s always on the list. ⁓ Yeah, I guess the only thing else comes to mind is, you know, we’ve been, it might be worth pointing out is, which we mentioned in the past, that this actual ⁓ technology stack is completely independent from being in Microsoft. ⁓ You know, we’ve been kind of, We’re obviously working with the LM partner. We’re not building a foundational model ourselves, but the stack, ⁓ you know, is coming via our own crawling, ⁓ the web pages where we’re generating the answers. And that index is improving every day. And so we’re working on that as well. ⁓ And ultimately we hope to say more about that. ⁓ I think that’s it. I mean, the, ⁓ Anything else you want to add or do we hit everything for the basics?

Ewa we hit everything that maybe one thing which is interesting to me, I don’t know if it’s going to be interesting to others, but ⁓ I think it’s also worth mentioning how we determine, for instance, answer correctness and how we’ve been actually using a lot of manual reviews of queries and answers within the team, which ⁓ I think is not obvious. Some people might assume that if you’re using AI generated also you also delegate to the AI to determine if it’s correct or not or if it includes enough details or not too much details. So the way we’ve been building assist is that we’ve done a lot of that manual judgment ourselves and we rely on these manually reviewed datasets. I’m pretty sure quite a few people in the team ⁓ might complain a lot about how tiresome and ⁓ maybe you it’s It’s not the most exciting work while you do it, but I think it’s extremely useful in really ensuring that these answers, when we say our correctness rate is high, this doesn’t mean that someone or AI tells us we’re doing a good job. It’s really, we’ve reviewed a huge, huge, huge data sets of queries and we retest them over time to ensure that this quality stays high.

Gabriel Yeah ⁓

Gabriel That’s good, that’s a way to end. I guess I have been forgetting to say, if you’re listening to this and you do have follow-up questions, email us. You can reply to the email that you get if you subscribe to us on Substack. Otherwise, we probably need to develop an email address that other people can send to us. So I’ll have to get back on that. But if you subscribe to the Substack, you can just reply to that email and it’ll come to us and we’ll get it for future episodes. So thank you everyone for coming on and thanks everyone for tuning in.

Ewa Thanks, Gabriel. Thanks, everyone.

In this episode, Gabriel (Founder) and Joe (Policy team) discuss why we donate, the types of organizations we donate to, and some examples of impact.

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 our full list of donations here.

Gabriel: Hello everybody, welcome back to DuckTales. I am Gabriel, the founder of DuckDuckGo. Today I have with me Joe, and we’re gonna talk about donations, but you want to start introducing Joe.

Joe: Thanks Gabriel. ⁓ So I am the senior public policy manager for DuckDuckGo. ⁓ What does that mean? ⁓ It sort of means that ⁓ I’m sort of the person in DC who sort of tilts at windmills, talks to Congress, works with lawmakers, and otherwise tries to keep the rest of the company abreast of how the US government and states are ⁓ pushing different types of regulations, solving online privacy. ⁓ and trying to make the internet a better place for everybody.

Gabriel: Cool, yeah, and there’s probably a lot of good feature episodes in all that, which is the main part of your A small of your job is you took over really running the process in which we make our donations every year. I realize it’s a small part of your job, but it’s important one, and I think important to our users, so you want to explain just kind of what that is?

Joe: Yeah, no, and look, I guess I shouldn’t oversell it, but I actually think it’s a really impactful part of the job. ⁓ It’s really, I think, like, it’s both, and we can talk about this, humbling and satisfying to be able to sort of allocate money to causes that are out there to try and improve trust online. ⁓ I’m our, I guess our DRI, our directly responsible individual for our corporate donations. ⁓ And this has actually become a pretty elaborate internal process to look at a whole bunch of different organizations. Now, I already mentioned I’m in DC, so I think about civil society groups, the Electronic Frontier Foundations of the world. ⁓ But we actually, you know, we give to a whole lot of different entities and organizations, ⁓ you know, sort of open source technology groups, ⁓ online technology reporters. and other organizations that do really impactful journalism on technology and data privacy. ⁓ And so, you know, I think there’s always sort of a push and pull to try and convince you to give us more money to give out each year. ⁓ But, you know, we give out, you know, over a million dollars to, I think this year it was something like 29 different organizations. ⁓ And it’s a, you know, it’s a detailed process. We spend a lot of months just arguing amongst ourselves about how we should allocate that money. And we’re, you know, we have a bunch of different criteria for what goes into this. ⁓ But, you know, we’re trying to both provide impactful donations. And so that means we give to a lot of small groups. ⁓ We’re also trying to sort of ensure that, you know, these groups are not just like aligned with us on one or two things, but are really out there trying to make the internet a better place. I mean, you know, if anybody’s been watching DuckTales, I think everybody would realize that DuckTales Go is a pretty mission driven company. And we’ve got this goal of expanding trust online. And we can’t do that ourselves. And there are a lot of different entities out there in the United States and globally ⁓ that are playing a really important role making the internet more trustworthy. And so we’re constantly trying to find ⁓ new voices to elevate and new projects to support.

Gabriel: Yeah, as completely slightly a tangent, but you mentioned it because this is inside dark echo. At dark echo, we have this concept of the DRI directly responsible individual. What that means is someone who owns something and. We have, as you might imagine, tons of processes internally, one of them being this art under nation’s process and every one of them has an owner. Um, and so, yeah, that’s just a little insight in baseball for us, but hundreds of those and Joe owns this process and it often gets handed, you know, over time that changes ownership, but, um, that really means taking ownership of it and kind of, um, driving it forward and seeing it to completion. Um,

Joe: Thank you.

Gabriel: But yeah, donations, I also see it as extremely key to our vision. So we actually started doing this a long time ago. ⁓ I think I have the, for anyone who wants to look at everything we’ve donated to, we have a page, ducktogo.com slash donations.

Joe: Good, it’s good that you got the microsite out there, that’s important.

Gabriel: I just went to it. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe: Yeah

Gabriel: lists, it literally lists everything we’ve donated to, you know, including this year, 2020, all the way back to, guess, the first year we did this was 2011, which is a long time ago. What I was going to say is directly related to what you said is that was right around the time when we, 2011 was the first year we had our first employee. It was me just before that. know, Cade came on and when we did that, that’s when we started laying out our vision, like explicitly our mission and vision. Um, and we, the vision in particular, rates of standard of trust online hasn’t changed since, and it’s not going to change, but it was, it was kind of tied to that. We always said, you know, We’re one company. I think it’s really like what you said. We can only do so much on our own. We have a much broader vision. How can we push that forward? Well, we can donate to other places that could really help. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah, I think it was in service of, to another one of your points, of making a bigger impact.

Joe: Okay.

Gabriel: And so like my original thought was the dollar amounts at the very beginning were very small because we were very small and had no real revenues or profits. So there wasn’t ⁓ much to give, but we figured out, you know, we still put aside money to try to do so. ⁓ And so when we were doing that, and I think some of this is carried through to today, we were really trying to find organizations that could really do a lot with a small donation, you know, like, ⁓ and that might’ve been. project where an extra few thousand dollars could really help. And when it came to now, like maybe we give 25,000 or something and that enables somebody to ⁓ spin up a project or create a, someone part-time to on something. I think those are the kinds of things that can really make an impact. ⁓ I think the reason for doing the thematic ones early on is, you know, just concentrating the small amount of money we have into one thing and hoping to make an actual on that thing. ⁓ Now the dollar amounts are greater but we’re still picking themes it’s just probably three or four themes broadly in donations. I mean that’s the way I look at it. Yeah.

Joe: Yeah, yeah. mean, I think now we pretty much are settled on, I would say, open technology or improving internet technology efforts, ⁓ data privacy. And then over the past few years, as we’ve been increasingly concerned about fair competition in digital markets, that’s become a bigger chuck. ⁓ But those are sort of the three buckets that think we’ve sort of narrowed in on, at least since I’ve been in charge of this.

Gabriel: Yeah, and the process has evolved. Why don’t you take us through kind of the current bones of the process as it stands today.

Joe: Yeah, that’s a good question. And I think actually a good opportunity to encourage folks to reach out if they want. you know, we like, there’s a couple of us internally that try to do a, some time over the year just sort of monitoring what groups are working on, ⁓ what they’re doing, whether it’s, ⁓ you know, basically sort of a subjective assessment of how impactful they are. ⁓ And then we have, I think it’s usually about a three month process that we kick off in you know, early summer to just sort of figure out like generally what are we interested in supporting over the year. And I think things that I think it’s worth highlighting that, you know, A, we’re a pretty community driven company. We’re also a team member driven company. I think it’s been really rewarding to have just ⁓ colleagues suggest, you know, organizations I had never heard of and that gets in there. So, you know, We are very much open to new ideas ⁓ and we support organizations globally, so I’m sure there’s plenty of things we have not heard of. So we create like a giant list of organizations and then we put it into a little bit of a rubric ⁓ and basically ask a number of questions about what we think the organization can do in the next year, ⁓ what actually would be impactful. Your point is totally valid. We’ve given money to support things like organizations being able to train up an employee. you know, think as you well know, like going from one to two employees can be hugely impactful for certain organizations. We’ve also, ⁓ you know, our support has allowed certain organizations to offer like health insurance to employees, which is not the, you know, really sort of makes you realize how, you know, some money can go a long way in things that are not just related to core, ⁓ you know, tech. projects, but literally people’s day-to-day well-being. ⁓ So we have this sort of rubric involved, and then we narrow it down. So part of the issue is we’d like to have a diverse, both geographic and ideologically diverse group of organizations. ⁓ We also sort of, at this point, have standardized our donation buckets a little bit. ⁓ we also like to keep a similar number of organizations. ⁓ You know, we started with, I think, six maybe, and we’re up to 29. And it becomes, and I think I’m one of these people, I’d love to give to every organization that exists, but that...

Gabriel: And what are the buckets to you mentioned buckets like what kind of our buckets

Joe: yeah, yeah, that’s good question. ⁓ So ⁓ right now we sort of give organizations $25,000, $50,000, and then $100,000. Now there are some exceptions to that, but that tends to be where the donations fall. ⁓ yeah, ⁓ part of this is a lot of people are involved, and I should say it takes a village. It’s not just the policy team, it’s the communications team. that work on things here. obviously have to get involved at some point. ⁓ I think it’s really important and they deserve all the credit in the world and maybe a DuckTales episode for themselves. Our finance team has to do a lot of stuff here and that’s like the nitty gritty paperwork and taxes and stuff that ⁓ is not super, well, it might be fun for them but it’s not as glamorous as the laudatory press releases we get from some of these groups. ⁓ We have changed over years when we have given donations. ⁓ In the past, we’ve tied it to Data Privacy Day in January. We’ve tied it ⁓ to Giving Tuesday after US Thanksgiving. ⁓ This year, we gave out our donations much earlier ⁓ in September. And part of that’s just because I’d actually love to ask you, I know we’ve tried to get our community involved. And I know we’ve tried to make donations a moment in time. But it’s not the most attractive story in a world where we’re dealing with AI regulations and ⁓ competition breakups. ⁓ So it is always a question of when is the time to announce this in a way that could actually be impactful. And I think that’s an open question we’ve struggled with.

Gabriel: Yeah, I’ve never cracked that code either. ⁓ So I open to your ideas there and it may be as the case. Yeah, we’ve had, we wanted to kind of like batch it so we can put it on the microsite and be like, here’s everything we did. And so I know we’ve given earlier in the year to some organizations who kind of needed it then, but then we tell that the announcement. but yeah, maybe there’s another way to do it where we kind of trickle it in over the year.

Joe: Yeah.

Gabriel: or something, know? I have no idea.

Joe: I mean, if anybody out there has ideas and wants to reach out on Reddit or social media, I’m here to facilitate that. I mean, guess I should also say, ⁓ we’re always trying to ensure that Gabriel’s email isn’t flooded with requests and demand. So, I mean, one of the reasons I’m here today is, you know, if you’re an organization or an entity or your project that you think, you know, is in line with improving standards of trust online, ⁓ Please reach out. I’m happy to give you more information, happy to add you to our list of folks that we consider in 2026. ⁓ But I think part of my job as the policy person at DuckDuckGo is really to serve as a point of contact. And I’m here to answer anyone’s questions if you want to reach out.

Gabriel: Yeah, well, people may take you up on that. To forward that further, I would say another thing that kind of distinguishes us initially, and this is in service of making an impact, and I’m pretty sure we still do this too, is we’re not really tying the donations to anything. A lot of philanthropic organizations say... ⁓ have to use it for this project, has to be earmarked for this, to your point, ⁓ supporting the organization for health insurance. I think that’s fine with us. We’re looking for impactful organizations where the money can really make a big difference. But if that’s the thing that’s going to make the organization more impactful, that’s okay with us because we’re more about the organization doing the job that it’s set out to do, mission. We have our mission. We’re supporting the mission of the other organization. And we want the organizations to exist. And often to exist, you need to give, in this example, your members health insurance.

Joe: Yeah, no, absolutely. mean, I would say that our donations have never really had any strings attached as far as I’ve been running them. ⁓ It actually leads to some interesting back and forths with groups. And this is relevant because I just had a conversation with them. So this year, we are actually giving some money to Consumers International ⁓ as part of their effort to kickstart basically a year-long process to build ⁓ ethical and privacy principles around agentic AI and AI privacy. ⁓ And so, you know, they approached us and really wanted to know what our involvement would be. And they were like, this would be a good thing for you guys to get involved with. And we’re like, sure, you here, here, like run with it. You don’t you don’t need ROK to come up with privacy principles. ⁓ You know, we support privacy generally. And if you guys come up with something that we can adopt that. that would be great, like, you know, it’s not like you need us to rubber stamp what a global consumer group wants to do on AI privacy. So, you know, that’s been another interesting example. And it is also like something I certainly appreciate is a number of the groups over the year like reach out and they want to like check in and they have a whole lot of stuff going on. Some of it super relevant to, you know, DuckDuckGo’s interests, some of it pretty far removed. ⁓ And it’s, least from my perspective, it’s a really interesting opportunity to get exposure to stuff that ⁓ doesn’t fit into, I think, the four corners of DuckDuckGo’s policy priorities.

Gabriel: Yeah, that’s interesting. yeah, you mentioned them. Are there any other organizations you think we should highlight maybe that we’ve given to a lot over the years? I mean, the one that jumps out to me is EFF. I know many years given to them, given the tour, many ⁓

Joe: Yeah, ⁓ mean the tour project was there from the beginning as far as I can tell

Gabriel: Right, yeah, I think it was. So yeah, I think you, I don’t know how many, do you have a count of like how many organizations we’ve given to?

Joe: Yeah, well, ⁓ and I put this into Duck AI earlier today, so if it’s wrong, it’s not my fault. ⁓ So we have given to a little under, I think, 100 organizations total over the past 15 years.

Gabriel: Okay. so, yeah, so there’s been a lot of different organizations if we’re doing about 30 a year, but yeah, there’s been some that have been there a lot. so like, know Tor, EFF, Signal over the last few years comes to mind. I’m not sure if any other ones you want to highlight or just from this year even, maybe we haven’t given it several years, but you just want to name a few.

Joe: Yeah, well, you know, I mean, I think one thing that I think is worth highlighting is we have increasingly given to organizations that focus on competition policy. ⁓ So in that respect, I want to give a shout out to Public Knowledge, which is a group that we’ve funded considerably. I mean, ⁓ this is a policy plug less than a donation plug, but, ⁓ you know, there aren’t a lot of tech-focused groups that think about competition. ⁓ And Public Knowledge is one of the exceptions to that. And from our perspective, there’s a huge host of problems with that. Like when you have lots of lots of big companies, they don’t have an incentive to protect privacy. so ⁓ supporting groups that sort of work at that intersection of competition and privacy ⁓ has been increasingly important to us.

Gabriel: Cool. Yeah, this has been great. Anything else you want to highlight that we maybe didn’t cover?

Joe: man I probably should have a better answer for that. ⁓ mean, again, I... No, no, no. mean, look, I think there’s... One of the things I have learned at DuckDuckGo is that there are always ways to improve processes and we’ve talked a little bit about our process. We are always trying to figure out ways to be more, I think, transparent with groups that are interested in funding and want to know, you know...

Gabriel: Well the answer could be we did a great job and we’ve covered all the bases so that’s it.

Joe: why we’re not funding them. ⁓ And so, again, I’ll just say that I think I exist to be a resource for that. So if you’re interested in funding, ⁓ please reach out. And I guess I’d say as we try and make this more of an established process, the earlier that folks can do that, the better.

Gabriel: Yeah, okay, that’s a good point. Thank you for doing that, too. I never want to say no to people, so I always find

Joe: Yeah

Gabriel: an awkward discussion. But yeah, there’s only so much.

Joe: ⁓ we’ve had some interesting conversations with groups this year.

Gabriel: Yeah. But thanks, Joe, for coming on. Yeah, reach out to Joe, ⁓ if you’re an organization. Otherwise, check out our donations page at stucco.com slash donations. Everything’s listed there back to 2011. And ⁓ otherwise, hope you tune in for the next episode. you.

In this episode, Beah (SVP, Product) and Zbig (Director, Talent) discuss our approach to hiring, and how it’s designed to reflect our unique, cross-functional and mostly async ways of working.

Show notes: Check out our careers page and open positions here.

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.

Beah: Hello. Hi, everyone. Welcome to DuckTales, ⁓ where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, our product updates, our approach to AI, or how we operate as a company, which is the zone that today’s episode will fall in. ⁓

Zbig: Okay.

Beah: introduce myself briefly. I’m Beah Burger-Lenahan. I lead the product team here at DuckDuckGo. And we have with me Zbig. Hey Zbig, do want to introduce yourself?

Zbig: Yeah, of course. Hi, Beah. Hi, everybody. I’m Zbig. I’m on the Talent Acquisition team. I’ve been around for almost seven years now at DuckDuckGo, and I feel very privileged to have seen this amazing journey of us scaling the team from about 50 to over 350, where we are right now and I’m super excited to be here and talk about hiring.

Beah: Awesome, thanks, the big. Yeah, so today we’re gonna talk about how we hire, what that process looks like, why, and so forth. Hopefully it’ll be interesting to everyone. ⁓ So maybe just to get started, can you kind of lay out at like the highest levels of our approach to hiring, what that process looks like?

Zbig: course. Yeah. So I think at a, at a highest level, um, there is, you know, lot of intentionality and discipline to how we hire. So we would do that only when we have like a really clear and well articulated need. So when we’re scoping roles, right? Like we would want to deeply understand what the actual tangible problems are that we want that particular role to solve for us. And then we designed the hiring process to test for the skills, the competencies that are critical to being able to do that. So in practice, that means that we base that hiring process ⁓ largely on test projects ⁓ rather than interviews. Well, there are usually a couple of interviews in every process, but we definitely attach way more weight to test projects. We also tried to design that hiring process in way that ⁓ it’s truly like a two-way street and allows Canada to discover how we work. So, you know, they can make a well-informed decision at the end about whether or not this is good place for them. And I think one other thing worth highlighting ⁓ that comes out of this intentionality and discipline is the fact that, you know, never in the company history, we were forced to do any group layoffs. And when you look at the tech market these days, that’s very rare.

Beah: Yeah, because we only hire people that we know we really need.

Zbig: that will really advance the goals of the company, right?

Beah: Yeah, got it. Okay, thanks. So let’s talk about the projects since they are, as you said, kind of the core of our process. Are these projects, do we expect people to do them for free?

Zbig: Sure. Yeah. No, we offer payment, which is kind of like average bubbly, but it’s usually like anything from 50 to 100 US dollars per an estimated hour of work required to complete a project. These are, and this is just like recognize the time candidates put into those. These projects are always role specific and designed to simulate the actual work one would be doing on the job. You can complete them async on your own time. And I truly believe that allows candidates to demonstrate the best of their abilities without the typical pressure and stress of interviews. And also like when you think of the async format, that much more closely reflects how we work on a daily basis at DuckDuck. Because I think that probably like, I don’t know, 70, 80 % of collaboration here happens asynchronously. There are a few meetings throughout the week. And ⁓ we’ve picked this format for the hiring process very intentionally. There’s actual research behind that that proves that work samples, test projects that are role specific, they’re much less prone to bias and error than interviews. And what we found through that ⁓ is that they are great predictors of future success on the job. And when you look at our retention rate, that’s 95%. You know, our engagement scores are also very high, like I think 86 % way above market benchmarks for companies of our size and at our stage of growth. like there’s actual, you know, quantitative validation that this approach works very well for us.

Beah: Yeah, is it challenging to get people to commit to doing these projects? It can be a bit of time.

Zbig: It is one of the bigger challenges of our hiring process because these test projects can take anything from like three, four hours up to 15 and in some cases maybe 20. And we typically expect folks to complete two of those, two sometimes three. So that’s like a time investment of about 25, 30 hours in test projects. I think we do our best to really to adjust to Canada’s availability. There’s like from our side, there’s no pressure on like when exactly they should be starting on those. They can plan ahead, set that time aside. If they need an extension, they can just let us know. And we usually have no problem to grant that because we understand that different things can come up in life that could derail their plans. So So we really try to adjust our pacing to candidates, be very flexible with those timeframes to ⁓ make it feasible for them.

Beah: Got it. I’m shifting gears a little bit. So where do we hire in the world and why?

Zbig: Hmm. So we hire globally though, not everywhere. We have like a selection of countries where that we’ve decided scale to based on like ⁓ a pretty nuanced estimate on the available town pools, how those relate to our needs, ⁓ how easy it is also to like scale within them from the administrative financial logistics perspective, perspectives, but we are able to hire across tens of countries around the the globe. And I think that’s awesome because that gives us access to amazing talent ⁓ that often when you think of some of these countries, there aren’t that many opportunities to work on something of a comparable scale that Go offers. So we’re way more competitive there, right? And we’re truly... I’m actually in Krakow in Poland and we have a pretty pretty big contingent here, like I think one of the fourth, fifth biggest representations geographically across the company with over 20 people. yeah, there’s definitely a great advantage of this remote setup that enables that. ⁓ And I think also what makes it possible is the fact that as a company, we’re designed from ground up for full remote collaboration, right? When you think of the companies that were switching to remote during the pandemic, that often didn’t work out and many of them are now calling people to go back to the office because they didn’t really have the right processes and culture to enable effective collaboration. I think that’s definitely not the case here.

Beah: Where are you located today?

Zbig:

Beah: Yeah. Yeah. I will say, mean, the remote ⁓ employee base has challenges for sure, and it has a lot of upsides as well. I think for me, like one kind of just fun perk of it is that it’s cool to know people from all over the world. ⁓

Zbig: yeah, for sure.

Beah: you know, when I think about like traveling I think, ooh, like who can I go see?

Zbig: Yeah. And also when you think of like, we’re building a global product or a set of global products, right? And I think it’s invaluable to have people from different geographies representing different cultures and perspective, because that helps us inform like how we can be building those products for a broader audience that really ⁓ meets their needs and solves jobs for them.

Beah: Yeah, makes sense. So you mentioned ⁓ one of the challenges of our hiring process is getting people to commit the time to the projects. Are there any other significant challenges?

Zbig: Mm. Yeah. I think the probably the biggest one is related to how we work. Cause as you know, we’re pretty uniquely organized over here. There’s no middle management. There’s no like separate project management function. And in practice, that means that everybody really is expected to be able to scope, propose and execute projects. Sometimes that means, you know, managing a cross-functional project team and that skillset is not that easy to get on top of the functional expertise, Like functional competencies. So ⁓ we often end up hiring, you know, we do most of our hiring in engineering and at a senior individual contributor level, like senior engineer, and we often end up hiring folks, you know, performing these like more senior leadership related responsibilities elsewhere, sometimes even like holding more senior titles than what, we have on the job description. Disclaimer though, don’t use job titles internally. We don’t want them to get out of picking the best solution or going in the most optimal route. We try not to make decisions based on authority. And that’s worked well for us, I think, over the years.

Beah: . . I’m curious. I’ve never asked you this question or I don’t know the answer. Do candidates find it appealing that we don’t use titles internally or does it put some people off?

Zbig: Thank I think many of them, I think many of them do, and they do highlight, well, we get a lot of that feedback from candidates in the hiring process, but some of them do raise it as an objection. And I get it. you know, I think typically on the market, there’s a lot of weight attached to job titles, right? Because they demonstrate certain progression throughout one’s career. And some candidates decide not to give that up, which I totally get, right? Like if someone is already like, I don’t know, staff. engineer, principal engineer, and the max they can get here with us is a senior level position. ⁓ I understand why, you know, a certain percentage of people would not want to do that, right? But in practice, though, like for people who really care primarily about the ability to make impact in the org, that title here, it doesn’t... doesn’t matter really, right? Like it does not give you more authority or impact in any way.

Beah: Yeah. So I think like in our conversation so far, a lot of it has been about this like very particular point of view that DuckDuckGo has that ⁓ may be different from a lot of companies, a lot of hiring processes.

Zbig: Mm-hmm.

Beah: ⁓ But my sense is also that we have evolved, like while we have a very particular point of view, it is not a stringent one that has been the same for years and years and years, like it’s evolved quite a bit. Any significant changes in your time here that you think are worth calling out?

Zbig: yeah, yeah, of course. And I think at a higher level even like we continue to iterate and improve all of our processes, right? ⁓ And that applies to hiring as well. So like one of the big things we had in the past was the so-called internal contracting period when, you know, once you completed the hiring process, we didn’t bring you in full time, but we asked you to do some sort of a part-time internal contract. you know, do some you know, a single sometimes maybe two projects as part of the team, but not working with us full time. So usually people, I did that too. It wasn’t the best experience. So the first thing I did after joining was to look at the data of like, okay, how many people going through that actually join, right? Like how big of a filter is that in our hiring process? And what it turned out was that, well, we actually bring in everybody. Like there was, think one exception that that we weren’t even like sure about going into that internal contracting period. But the data told the story that, well, the hiring process itself is such a good predictor already. We don’t need that. And that was a, I think that was a great change because it enabled us to engage with people who otherwise would not be able to invest that time on top of their jobs or personal obligations, right? So that was definitely a big enabler in accelerating the pace of hiring.

Beah: I did that. ⁓ back. Got it. So we did that, that was like inspired by you not having a good experience, like the con, you being kind of put off by the.

Zbig: Not just me, There was a broader, like my experience was one of the data points, but there was a broader discussion with leadership where, you know, we looked at like, okay, how scalable is that? Like we’re hiring maybe 20, 30 people per year. We were when I was joining, but we were looking at increasing that substantially, right? So it wasn’t a great experience for candidates. wasn’t a great experience for people internally. Ask to oversee those internal. contracting period, so there were multiple arguments for making that change. But only when we examined the data, we knew that, OK, that’s up. It doesn’t make sense to be doing that anymore.

Beah: Mm. Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned we were hiring maybe 20, 30 people a year at that point. Can you talk about what our hiring volume looks like now?

Zbig: Yeah, so it’s our record year this year. So I’m super pumped about that. We are on 80 hires this year, ⁓ which is absolutely amazing. Yeah, yeah, there may be a couple more. So we’ll see. ⁓ But yeah, it’s really great to see that growth. And we’re bringing in some amazing people. So yeah, that’s super cool.

Beah: And we got 2 months left to go. Yeah, do you think we, over the process of the last few years, our ability to make the right selection in terms of both people that will be successful here and that will be happy and thrive and want to stick around has improved?

Zbig: I think so, yeah, and quite considerably. ⁓ So we were looking to tighten the feedback loop for new hires to get an even better sense of how fast new hires are reaching full productivity. But when we look at the data, ⁓ the success rate is very high. And ⁓ we rarely have instances of new hires failing to meet expectations, which is another benefit of this highly disciplined, intentional approach. ⁓

Beah: Yeah, you mentioned 95 % retention. Yeah, that seems very good.

Zbig: retention. Yeah, that’s continued over the years, right? Like when we scaled from 50 to over 350, we’ve managed to maintain that. And I think we’re only getting better.

Beah: Yeah, I remember when I was in a much loosey-gooseier process to be hired at DuckDuckGo seven-ish years ago. was talking to Gabriel and I was kind of asking him about what it’s like to work at DuckDuckGo and he was like, mean, nobody’s really left in the last four years. It wasn’t exactly what he said, but was something like that. Basically nobody had left in years, maybe like one or two people. ⁓

Zbig: Right. Later. Yeah, yeah,

Beah: Okay, one more question for you and then ask if you have anything else you want to say before we close. what, I’m curious what proportion, where are coming from? ⁓ What portion of hires are referrals versus inbound?

Zbig: So the vast majority comes through inbound, and that’s a combination of our Curious website and ads we post on LinkedIn and other job boards. But Curious is still, I think, the main contributor there. It’s, I think, 64 % for inbound total. And that makes sense, right? We have such a big user base where pretty popular among engineers. A lot of our hires are actual users of our products, which is amazing because then they contribute with their feedback and thoughts to helping us improve our products. ⁓ Similar to other companies, ⁓ the second best source of hires is referrals. I think a quarter of our hires ⁓ come from referrals and ⁓ that’s always been a great source also in terms of the retention and performance of these folks. So we’re trying ⁓ to leverage that as much as possible.

Beah: Also, just interject that when we hire people who are not users of our product. They’re also really great at helping make the product better because my question is, why aren’t you a user? What’s stopping you? I mean, we expect everybody to use our products once they’re here, but it’s sort of nice to have people who maybe like weren’t dedicated, loyal users ahead of time because they maybe have a different basis of comparison and also reflect a large number of users that we would like to ⁓ list.

Zbig: For sure. Of course. Yeah. I think. Exactly. I think it’s great to have both of these perspectives, right? ⁓ Because the non-users, they usually bring a completely new set of eyes and views on our product offering. So yeah, I think we’re really contributing from having people from both of these poles.

Beah: Yeah, what anything else that you want to share before we wrap, Sabing?

Zbig: I think, yeah, I mean, like one other interesting thing is that it does take a lot of effort to hire, you know, and we have multiple people from our functional teams, engineering, other teams too, involved in the hiring process to help with test project reviews, to help with interviews. And perhaps for this, I looked up the data and, you know, only this year we’ve done over 2300 project reviews and 790 almost 800 interviews. So yeah, it’s a huge effort that goes into that. But we honestly think it’s worth it. Like getting hiring right and making sure that people who bring in will make a positive impact that will be happy here. I strongly believe this is one of the most powerful levers we can be pulling as a company. I think that effort is totally worth it. And of course, we continue to look at how we can optimize and improve the efficiency of the hiring process so it’s less of an effort. But that’s a continuous process,

Beah: . Okay. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you, Zabig. That’s all I got.

Zbig: Awesome. Well, super happy to be here and thank you for this. That’s been great.

Beah: Alright, see you later!

Zbig: See ya.

In this episode, Beah (Product) and Max (Frontend) discuss cookie pop-up protection, why our solution is uniquely private, and the feedback loops we use to help us reject cookies across more of the sites you visit.

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.

Beah: Hello and welcome to DuckTales where we go behind the scenes with DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees ⁓ about our vision, product updates and our approach to AI or how we operate as a company. In this case, today we’re going to be talking about a feature that I dearly love.

⁓ cookie pop-up protection with ⁓ Max here. So let me just do some quick introductions, I guess, before I’m kind of getting a little ahead of myself. I’m Bea Berger-Lenahan. I lead the product team here at Tech Tech Go. And I’m going to be asking Max a few questions. Max, would you like to introduce yourself?

Max: Yeah, sure. Hey, ⁓ my name is Max. I am an engineer in the front-end team at DuckDuckGo. Been here for about three years, a little more. Yeah, I’m excited to talk about cookie pop-up protection.

Beah: Awesome. Thank you, Max. We’re glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re here. ⁓ So first, just tell me, tell all of us a little bit about what cookie pop-up protection is, how it works.

Max: Yeah, so this is the ⁓ feature in our browsers that handles cookie pop-up for you. ⁓ And in a nutshell, it... ⁓ that’s a good question. ⁓ I mean, I think most people have seen a cookie pop-up, but yeah, the definitions vary, but we’re talking about these...

Beah: What’s a cookie pop-up first? Hahaha

Max: dialogues that websites show you on the first visit that typically tell you something about their data sharing practices and the use of cookies and similar technologies. And sometimes they give you a way to opt out of some optional tracking ⁓ or cookies. And that’s what we’re actually doing. We’re automating, ⁓ basically clicking reject buttons for you or whatever it takes to...toggle all these little checkboxes and saving the settings. ⁓ I could demo it if that’s okay. ⁓ So let me share my screen. ⁓

Beah: That’d be great.

Max: So for the sake of the demo, I’ve disabled the feature in the settings right now. It’s enabled by default, ⁓ but I’m just going to show you. ⁓ So if we go to Sky Scanner, for example, and I’m in the Netherlands, so you see a Dutch version, but there is this huge cookie pop-up ⁓ when you load the page. And if I enable the feature, cookie pop-up protection and reload the page, you’re not gonna see this pop up anymore. And what happened, and then there will be a ⁓ little notification in the address bar. And if you drill down, you’ll see the explanation

Beah: Okay. Okay.

Max: what happened. But basically what happened behind the scenes is we clicked on the reject button rejecting the cookies automatically. And that’s why we call it cookie pop-up protection. ⁓ So for us, this is a privacy protection feature because it actually ⁓ chooses the most private option for you, which is not always easy. Let’s see.

Beah: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if we have data on this, but I imagine very few people are willing to go into, you know, click the option to actually adjust ⁓ settings and start toggling things on and off on the regular.

Max: Yeah, ⁓ that’s for sure. So ⁓ some pop-ups can be really tricky to opt out. ⁓ You would need to go to click, Settings and then toggle a bunch of check boxes and then click Save. This can become... Like most people, think they just click Accept button. ⁓ And ⁓ yeah, this is of course not good for your privacy. ⁓ So we help...

Beah: Yeah.

Max: getting through these dark patterns.

Beah: Yeah, makes sense. why did we build this? What’s the origin story?

Max: Yeah, so ⁓ like many other features that go, it started as like a hack project, which is when someone goes in and tries to tackle the problem in a couple of days. And ⁓ of course, cookie pop-ups are universally annoying and wanted to do something about it. ⁓ And we built some prototypes. And then eventually we built a feature on top of a ⁓ prior work of my colleague, Sam Macbeth, who... ⁓ So we have an open source library that does most of the ⁓ things that we... ⁓ And we ⁓ use it and it powers all our... ⁓ This feature in all our browsers.

Beah: Nice. ⁓ Max, did I cut off your demo? Did you want to show anything else there?

Max: No, I’m trying to stop presenting it just doesn’t work. I’m clicking the button

Beah: Oh, okay. Alright, I was just worried I cut you off. Alright, we’ll see if it responds at some point. So, okay, so just to recap, ooh, there it goes, okay. Just to recap, we are a, removing the annoyance of you’re like trying to go to Skyscanner, I don’t know what that is, you’re trying to go to Skyscanner and instead of getting whatever it is that’s on Skyscanner, you’re getting this big like notification in your face, we’re making that go away and we’re going in and we’re changing the settings to be more privacy respecting. That sounds great. What’s the downside?

Max: Correct. And that’s, so like ⁓ this ⁓ approach actually is actually quite intentional, right? So as I mentioned this, we’re trying to maximize user privacy and ⁓ because there are other solutions on the market that do like ranging from clicking accept button, which is not acceptable for us. But also ⁓ there’s another approach of like preventing the interaction. And for us, this was very important to do it this way, to actually actively opt out because, well, first of all, ⁓ this is like the only way to opt out of ⁓ server side tracking we know of. ⁓ the second, it gives a clear signal to the website through the official channels.

Max: And then finally, in some legislations, it’s actually the only way to opt out. So for example, in California, they can sell your data by default unless you click on the button. So ⁓ yeah, we think that as long as the site is compliant with the law, this approach is better for privacy. ⁓ And if it’s not compliant, we still have our tracker blocking and other privacy protections to fall back to. And so this is of course, so speaking of challenges, ⁓ this is a bit more involved than just, you know, blocking some requests to or blocking the pop-ups from loading. ⁓And so it needs a bit more effort because we actually need to automate each and every pop-up vendor. So it takes a bit more effort. But yeah, this is something we chose to do. I think we, for a while now, we’ve covered most of the, all of the major pop-up vendors, which is like 80, 90 % of top sites in Europe and the US.

Beah: So that’s roughly the percent of cookie pop-ups that we think we’re successfully blocking at this point.

Max: Yes, so that is 80 or 90 % of all pop-ups that you see on the top sites are handled. And one of the biggest challenges is this long tail of sites, because of course, no one visits just the top sites. And like, each of us has this one site that no one else visits.

Beah: Mm-hmm. Okay.

Max: And yeah, this is something we’ve been focusing on lately. We’re trying to ⁓ experiment in with automated approaches and using AI as well. And we’ve had some good success in the past months with it. So I think we’re gonna ramp up the this long tail coverage in the coming weeks and months. Yeah, and

Beah: And how are you finding those? Do you want to talk about like how your finding those sites, which includes internal reporting, right?

Max: Yeah, so we have a few different ⁓ feedback loops, as I say. of course, we have ⁓ our own crawling. So we ⁓ regularly crawl top sites ⁓ and trying to detect new pop-ups and handle them. ⁓ Then we have user reports, ⁓ breakage reports, and just user feedback reports. that we have special systems that filter out and surface the reports related to cookie pop-ups. And we also have very active internal reporting, which is DuckDuckGo employees who go above and beyond and just report new sites to us. is a very important source of feedback because we can get back to those people and verify.

Beah: Who’s the number one reporter of cookie pop us.

Max: the number one is Gabe. ⁓ So our CEO, he’s like, I think it’s fair to say that half of all the internal reports come from him. I have no idea how he does it.

Beah: Hahaha I know. Yeah, sometimes I think maybe I can catch him, but I don’t know. I don’t know that I can. ⁓ So if a user watching this encounters a cookie pop-up, what should they do? How should they report it?

Max: Yeah.

⁓ So it depends on what kind of user there are. Like the easiest thing would be to send the feedback through the app. We have this ⁓ feature. Or if something actually doesn’t work, then feel free to send the breakage report, site breakage report at this. But if you’re actually a developer, then

This whole thing is open source. And we welcome external contributions. You can go to GitHub, ⁓ find this library, called AutoConsent, and file some issues or even pull requests. This is always welcome. And we’ve had some external contributions before ⁓ from also other companies who are using this library. It’s not only ⁓ used in DuckDuckGo apps. ⁓ So yeah, if you’re that person, we’ll be happy to.

Beah: Nice. So to recap, have to be, you only get this feature if you’re using our browser. If you’re using search and you click in another browser and you click on a search result and you land on a page with a cookie pop-up, we can’t really do anything to help you there, much as we’d love to. So you got to install our browser. But if you are using our browser on mobile or desktop, you can go into the menu and there’s a send feedback button and That’s a good way, like we actually read those, so please do send that feedback and we will try to fix it.

Max: Yes, that’s right. So make sure to mention clearly that this is about cookie pop-up not being handled or some issue with cookie pop-ups and then we will see it.

Beah: You can say, dear Max, please fix this cookie pop-up. But you have to be polite, obviously. Awesome. All right, before we wrap, Max, is there anything else that you want to add that we haven’t touched on?

Max: Yeah That’s a possibility. ⁓ No, really just I’m excited ⁓ to spread awareness of this feature because ⁓ you know when it works and it does work you don’t notice it so anything we can do to ⁓ let people know that this exists and that it actually ⁓ helps.

Beah: Yeah, here, here, the time when I notice it is when I go into other browsers to test things or experiment with something and I get all these cookie pop-ups. And I’m in the US, so I’m sure it’s worse if you’re in Europe, ⁓ and I’m just like, how do you live with this? So, and I scurry back to our browser. Awesome, well, thank you so much, Max. It’s been great learning a little bit more about cookie pop-up protection. Appreciate your time.

Max: Yeah, thank you for having me.

In this episode, Gabriel (Founder) and Chris (Subscription team) discuss why we built the DuckDuckGo Subscription, its four features, and how it protects more of what you do 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.

Show notes: Learn more about the DuckDuckGo Subscription here.

Gabriel: Hello everybody. Welcome back to DuckTales, everything DuckTale go. I’m Gabriel, founder, CEO. I got with me Chris. Do want to introduce yourself?

Chris: Yeah, hi, I’m Chris Calvi, ⁓ long time listener, first time caller. Had to say that. ⁓ But ⁓ I’ve been at DuckDuckGo for a little over four years. I’m on the partnerships team here. And ⁓ I guess I’ll take a second to talk about the partnerships team, what we are. ⁓ We are primarily the team that handles all of the relationships with third party companies that DuckDuckGo works with.

Chris: We’re a relatively small team, about 10 people. you know, classic examples of companies that we’d be working with are any of the live information that you’re seeing when you search DuckDuckGo. So that would be like sports scores or stock quotes, weather, that sort of information, also like flights and lyrics, all of those relationships, we get that information, we license it from...from other companies. that would be an example of work we would be doing. And then also, we will even work on things like infrastructure partnerships with cloud partners and AI companies and all that stuff. So that’s what we do over here at Partnerships more recently.

Gabriel: Interestingly though, the way we work, and this gets more inside deck to go since the name of our blog on this, we don’t really work functionally though. We have objectives inside the company to get a particular thing done, and that thing usually involves many different functional teams. What that also means is those objectives have owners and they can be from any functional team. ⁓

You tell me how you think of that, but I think if you do what doing recently actually was not very partnershipy. You’ve been helping launch different parts of our Dr. Go subscription, which involves some partnerships, but like your day-to-day job is not always partnership related.

Chris: Yeah, mean, absolutely. And I think you as people, if they listen to a bunch of these episodes, they’ll see that. People might be leading an objective and they’re on the design team or in this case, the partnership team. A lot of times it is somebody from the product team. And in this case, I’m working a little closer on the product side. So you’re right.

Gabriel: And yeah, so we’re going to talk today a little bit more deeply because you’ve been working on it about the DuckDuckGo subscription. We’ve mentioned it on some of these episodes, but haven’t really given a big overview. So that’s what this is going to be. The subscription is a bundle. So it’s got a bunch of different things in it, which maybe you can get an overview in a second. But just to say that we might have separate episodes about going deep into some

⁓ One of those things are a technical aspect to them, but this is we can give more of an overview of kind of where it came from and what it exists today and kind of where we’re headed with it. You want to start and just tell us kind of like what’s in it and how it works.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good. The DuckDuckGo subscription is a relatively new thing for us. We launched this in April of 2024, so it’s really only been around for a year and a half compared to the search product, for instance, that’s been around for a very long time. And what it does is really, I mean, in a nutshell, it supercharges some of the existing functionality you have. It gives you extra privacy features within your DuckDuckGo ⁓ app and experience. ⁓ It does a little beyond that too, which we’ll talk about, but that’s the key thing. ⁓ The other thing I will note is that if for long time subscribers, you may have originally remembered it being called Privacy Pro. That was the original name for it. We recently just changed it to DuckDuckGo subscription for to keep things simple. So we’ll call it the subscription for the rest of the episode. ⁓ But before I like...

Gabriel: Yeah, give us the basics. yeah, what’s in it? Yeah.

Chris: Yeah, the basic things, the four basic things in there are the, you got the VPN, which we’ll talk about what that is in a second. You get access to advanced AI models within Duck AI. You ⁓ get personal information removal, which I’ll talk about what that is, as well as identity theft restoration. But before I go down all that, I did want to ask back to you about ⁓ why we came up with a subscription. and then I’ll kind of unpack each of those core pieces.

Gabriel: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the way I think about it more broadly is we want to be your clean internet experience. Like if you want a more protected way to operate online where you’re not getting followed by ads and you’re not giving up your personal information, you kind of adopt the DuckDuckGo ecosystem. And so that’s our browser, it’s our search engine, it’s our AI product. And generally we want to offer those essentially for free. mean, there’s advertising model in the search engine that pays for this, but we can, we want to give it for free in the sense that mo because more people can use it around the world. However, there are certain protections that costs us a lot of money to do that we hadn’t been able to offer because of that. So VPN is the obvious, a canonical example there, because when you turn on the VPN, now all your bandwidth is running through that VPN and a lot of that’s video. ⁓ And it’s just not something that can be advertising supported. doesn’t, the numbers don’t add up. And so we’ve wanted to offer that because it is a key part of being fully protected for people who want that kind of fuller protection, but we couldn’t offer it for free. And so we needed a subscription. At that point, I thought, hey, we could just offer a VPN, but...

I think there are other things in this category that have real marginal cost in business terms. ⁓ And it would be great if we could bundle them all together at one low price and allow DuckDuckGo users who really want more protection ⁓ to be able to get it in one place. You don’t have to sign up for multiple things. And that’s where the subscription came from. ⁓ I think we’re living up to that. hope over time we add more and more things and make it more and more valuable without increasing the price or much at all. ⁓ But yeah, that’s where it came from.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, that makes sense to me. to dive into the four pieces of functionality, I’ll start with VPN, because you mentioned that. We probably should give a little bit of a high level of what a VPN is. So it stands for virtual private network. But what that means is that we basically have this anonymous private secure no logs VPN server that’s sitting out there, right? And we have these in 40 locations around the world. You likely are connecting to the one closest to you, but you can change it to go to another country. But what it does is all of your internet traffic, the requests that you’re making to, for instance, as you browse the web, are gonna be securely essentially tunneled through that server and then sent out to the resource where you’re requesting that information. So the website that you’re accessing,

they’re not going to see, under normal conditions, without a VPN, they would see your IP address. In this case, they’re going to see the DuckDuckGo server’s IP address, which is meaningless, essentially, to them from a privacy perspective. So it preserves your privacy on that front. then they’re sending that information back, and then it’s coming back to you. So then the second place where it’s adding privacy is on your own, sort of like your internet connection. So if you’re...

⁓ you’re making that request in a lot of cases your internet provider or if you’re using like a public Wi-Fi, they can see the sites that you are accessing and sometimes can see the information that’s coming back and forth. And in this case where it’s that since it’s all being encrypted and coming through the duck, going to DuckDuckGo server first, they’re only seeing that you’re connecting to this one server and that they’re not seeing any of the data in between. So it gives you sort of that two different protections when you use a VPN. I don’t know if I’ve done it justice.

Chris: Yeah, I think you did a great job there. The only thing I would add to that is, yeah, so it really shields your IP address and other information from leaking to both your internet provider and the sites that you’re visiting, as well as all the places in between too. People may not realize like when you route across the internet, you connect to something and then you connect to like a bunch of different hops in between lots of other internet providers. And it shields not only from the end points, but everything in between.

⁓ Additionally, the IP address is often used to get your location. ⁓ And so by effectively shielding your IP address, you’re effectively shielding your location. And the final thing I would add is like, it may seem esoteric, like do I need to shield this stuff from these people? ⁓ But it’s been well documented that ISPs, internet providers are selling this data all the time. ⁓ And so...

If you want to be maxing protected, you do want to have the VPN. ⁓ And you know, I leave it on all the time, our VPN. The other thing, the final thing I would add, which you know, doesn’t relate to the privacy necessarily, but it kind of relates to it in the sense that trusting us is that we decided not to sub license this VPN or anything from anybody else. We are operate, we made this from scratch. We’re operating all the servers ourselves. ⁓ And so it’s fully DuckDuckGo operated.

Chris: Yep. ⁓ Thank you. ⁓ And then on the kind of jumped into the next feature that I had mentioned was the advanced ⁓ AI model. So you get in Duck AI. So ⁓ Duck AI is free. You don’t need an account to access it. And it’s our AI chat ⁓ product. But if you’re a DuckDuckGo subscriber, you get ⁓ access to advanced models and higher limits on the models that are available for free.

So the advanced models sort of the difference between the advanced models and the free models Well the advanced models just to name them are ⁓ open AI’s GPT 4o GPT 5 Anthropics ⁓ Claude sonnet 4 and Metas llama for Maverick and So we have these are available if you’re a subscriber and then we have the free models which are available to everyone

Those free models are great for lighter weight tasks that are optimized for speed, whereas these more advanced models are made for more complicated prompts and more challenging scenarios. I don’t know if you have anything to add on to that.

Gabriel: No, that’s a good explanation. The only thing I would add would be it’s for the same reason like the VPN, like these advanced models cost a lot of money to run. when you’re the computation on advanced models, it’s more computation, more computation, it’s more cost. And so we just couldn’t offer them for free. But as part of the subscription, it’s a natural fit. if you’re paying for it, and we haven’t said the price yet, so why don’t you explain what our pricing is?

Chris: Yeah. So.

Gabriel: But if you’re paying for it, we can afford to give you this. But we’re still trying to strike a balance here and give. We’re not trying to make tons of money off this. We’re trying to give a good price for the bundle. And so we think we’ve been pricing it competitively.

Chris: Yeah, absolutely. I should, yeah, let’s step back. the thing I’ll say is it’s available in 30 countries today. So the U S Canada, UK, and all 27 member countries of the European union. And you, the price in the U S is nine 99 a month and it’s nine or 99 99 a year. So basically $10 a month or a hundred dollars a year if you sign up annually.

⁓ And then it’s that’s basically in your local currency if you’re subscribing from one of those other countries ⁓ But you can get a free seven-day trial too. So ⁓ That’s that’s important to note so you can give it a spin See if you like it and then if you do like it you can continue on

Gabriel: Got it, okay, so we have VPN and DuckAI advanced models. Now as I understand that those are available in all those countries, the other two features are more US, or there’s one of them US specific and one of them we need to talk about how it might differ, right?

Chris: Yeah, yeah, let’s talk about personal information removal first because I think ⁓ that one is US only. And the reason for that is, you could probably go on about this, it’s primarily a US only problem. And so the way that, what happens if you’ve ever searched, for people listening, have you ever searched the internet for their name, which I’m sure everyone’s done at some point you’re going to see yourself show up in, especially if you type in your name in your city, if you have a less common name, you’re going to see a bunch of stuff show up, lot of of spammy sites that have your address, maybe your phone number, email, some other information, maybe socials. This stuff, ⁓ they are selling essentially, and in the US, a lot of countries make that illegal, in the US it’s not. So ⁓ what we will do is with personal information removal is,

We help you go out and on your behalf, we opt you out from I think at least 80 sites like that today and we add more all the time. And so that’s how that works. Yeah, but I don’t know what else you have to add onto that.

Gabriel: No, you’re right. I mean, that’s why it’s in the US because it’s just not a problem. It’s not really a problem outside of the US. I mean, the only thing I would add would be this is one of the reasons why people are getting tons of spam, texts and junk mail previously, now lots of, you know, everyone’s got a phone, spam, texts. And so if you remove yourself from these sites, that will reduce as well as potential for identity theft. And spam emails too, sometimes the emails out there. ⁓ In any case, ⁓ it’s US only, but if you’re in the US, it is a real problem. And I suggest you do something about it, if not from us, from somewhere, because it really does make a difference if you remove the things. Now, the other thing I would say, and we’ll probably do another episode of this, is that these sites are often, like you said,

they’re buying and selling information from other sites and other places. And so if you just remove yourself once, your information will come back on these sites eventually because they ⁓ just buy it again and get it from somewhere else or from public record or something like that. That’s another problem with the US is they get it off from public records. like you like buy a house or something and they end up buying that information. ⁓ But that’s why you want a service to do it because we are constantly, the service is monitoring it and scanning these sites repeatedly. And so if your information shows up again, three months later, it’ll get noticed and then we’ll submit another removal request to remove it. So it’s kind of like always working in the background to remove yourself in an automated fashion from all these sites that we cover.

Chris: Is it worth talking about kind of how that information stays on your local machine in this?

Gabriel: Yeah, I think so. I think so because it’s a differentiator and it took us a lot more time to build this because of that. But I do think it’s a privacy benefit and worth it relative to other sites that do similar. Yeah, you want to explain it? I can do it too if you want.

Chris: Yeah, mean, well, when you said it’s happening in the background, what we mean is quite literally on your computer in the background. It’s not happening on your data, you know, because we need, in order to opt out, you need to provide your name, right? And some information so that the service can opt you out. So rather than that information living on our servers and then doing the opt outs, it lives on your computer and does the opt out.

And to your point, you mentioned that’s a differentiator. And it’s like a core thing for us is that we don’t want your personal information. As much as possible, we just don’t want it. And so that’s, I think, was worth mentioning with this product.

Gabriel: Yeah, I’m actually not familiar with any other product that does it that way, that where your information really doesn’t live on an account on the server. It’s on your, in this case, your browser. It’s built into the browser. I think there’s two reasons for that. One is to do that, you have to have a browser. So we have a browser. So we were kind of uniquely able to do this versus like a web service. And also it’s a really pain to build this, to actually get it to work in the background. I don’t think anyone would do this. unless they really wanted to get that privacy protection ⁓ maximum, which is what we generally do. ⁓ So yeah, it’s unique in that regard. ⁓ We should probably mention that that is desktop only for that reason, because it was very difficult to bring it to mobile. But we’ve been working on bringing it to mobile. And that’s kind of like next step for personal information removal is bringing it to our iOS and Android browser.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I’m glad you mentioned that because I know that that is a big piece of feedback we receive. A lot of our users use, they may only use us on mobile, they may only have a mobile device, and so they’re not able to currently use this functionality unless they get a desktop going and get it going on there. So it’s exciting news. ⁓

If we pivot over to that last piece, the four, so there’s the VPN, advanced AI models, personal information removal, and then that last one is identity theft restoration. This is essentially in the instances where you are the victim of ⁓ identity theft. ⁓

and you mentioned that it’s a little bit the function, that way that it works is slightly different whether you’re in the US or in another country. If you’re in the US, if you use identity theft restoration, they’ll be able to do ⁓ some of the, if you’re trying to restore your credit and everything like that, whatever was stolen, they’re gonna give you guidance on how you can, ⁓ you’ll connect with an advisor, essentially you’ll make a phone call.

They’re going to help you, they’re going to handle your case, help you get your identity restored. In some cases in the US, they’ll actually be able to handle some of that work on your behalf. They may be able to contact financial institutions and things like that for you. ⁓ For identity theft restoration outside of the United States, they’re only going to be able to provide you the steps, essentially. The guide, like they’re going to say, this is what you have to do, then you’ll have to do it. So that’s one, that is a different it’s worth noting between the US version and the ⁓ version available to everyone else. ⁓

Gabriel: Yes, and so like this, I mean the way I think about this is, you know, we’re really trying as a company with the product to cover all the bases for you, you know, online and protection in your life. And so we’re, you if you use our product, you’re really reducing your personal information out there, essentially to the maximum you can easily. But it can never go to zero, unfortunately. And if someone’s really trying to target you,

Maybe they’re looking through your garbage, who knows? You ⁓ can be a victim of identity theft and there’s a lot of people who have been the victim of identity theft, unfortunately, it’s not a small problem, certainly in the US. I know more about the US, but ⁓ it’s a big problem in the US in part because we were talking about those laws earlier. ⁓ But if you are, it can really be a big pain. ⁓

Gabriel: People can open bank accounts on your behalf and credit cards and spend money. They can mess up your credit report. And so what this is is essentially a peace of mind such that if that happens, we’ve partnered with this service that 100 % focuses on helping people restore their identity. So you will get a personal advisor to really walk you through this process so you’re not on your own. And they do it every day.

you that’s their whole business is what they do is help people restore their identity. ⁓ And so by buying into subscription, you’re essentially buying the, ⁓ for this part of the subscription, the ability to have access to this advisor should you unfortunately find yourself in this situation, which we hope never happens. But if it did happen, you’d have this ability to help you.

Chris: Great, yeah. That covers the kind of the four, I don’t know how we’re doing on time, but that covers our four pieces of function.

Gabriel: We have no real time limit. This is longer than we’ve normally gone, but we have, this is a big topic, so we don’t have to go super much longer, but if there’s a few things or anything else you want to hit, we could do so.

Christopher: I I guess, like, I’ll just kind of piggyback. You made that point earlier about the subscription is about providing the extra functionality that would normally, that costs money, essentially. The other stuff we’re able to do in an ad-supported way or in a free way, whereas this, you know, the things that we’re offering here, it doesn’t work. You need to pay for it, essentially. ⁓ what I will say is that it’s very complimentary.

to everything that DuckDuckGo is doing on the free side. And we continue to grow and add new stuff on the free side ⁓ all the time. But what I’ll say is that if you are a current user of either our search or ⁓ DuckAI or our apps, this is, like I’ve found it to be ⁓ just incredibly complimentary. It sits very nicely on top of all of that. You turn it on.

⁓ And to your point, you said you use the VPN all the time. I use it all day, every day. I’m using it right now on this call and I use it ⁓ on my phone all day. ⁓ And it’s really quite delightful to have that extra protection on top of everything else and to have the extra AI models, know, GPT-5. 5 Mini is in the free version, but 5, just 5 is not. And so you get that with the...with the subscription and so, yeah, think I’ll just end it there. Some of the stuff that I really like about the VPN is you can opt out, know, unlike for instance the Mac version, you can exclude certain sites because certain sites don’t play as well with a VPN, like ⁓ some streaming video for instance, like Netflix, you might run into issues where they’re not gonna stream it to you. So you can exclude a site or, ⁓

in my Android app I can snooze, ⁓ which you can snooze the VPN for 30 minutes, which is really great for if you’re troubleshooting or if you can’t access your bank’s app or whatever through. So that happens from time to time.

Gabriel: Yeah, these are good points. mean, yeah, we can wrap it up. I mean, I agree it fits nicely and is designed to fit nicely just on top of our regular stuff. And in particular, it’s built in, it’s mainly built into our browser, right? So if you get it, then you have some extra stuff going on inside your experience that you can get access to. I should also add that a lot of the things that you just mentioned, those are new features since we launched this description. So.

We’re adding new free stuff all the time. We’re adding actually stuff to the subscription all the time. You know, we have, we’ve plugged a few times, but we have a quarterly update website, ducktico.com slash updates. I think it’s slash updates. Yeah, okay. And you can go through and look at like quarter by quarter, there’s a section for the subscription and you can see, you know, what we’ve been doing there, but like we’re constantly thinking about what to add to it. So it’s not going to be static. In fact,

Chris: It is, yeah.

Gabriel: the AI model aspect of it, you worked on, just got added recently, right? So we have more coming and ⁓ yeah, so thanks Chris, thanks for coming on. Thanks everybody for listening this long. ⁓ I think we’ll do deep dives. I think we should do deep dives on each of the four things in a future episode. I think those would make good episodes. Yeah, cause there’s so much to cover there. All right, let’s get out of here. Thanks everybody.

Chris: Yeah, for sure. For sure. All right, thanks Gabriel.

In this episode, Cristina (SVP, Marketing) and Chuck (Front‑end) discuss private marketing at DuckDuckGo, from making decisions with less data to the role of privacy engineers in marketing projects.

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.

Cristina: Hi, and welcome to DuckTales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering approach to AI, or how we operate as a company. Today, we’re going to chat about how most companies collect a ton of information through their marketing activities and how DuckDuckGo, given our privacy policy of we don’t track you, do things like attribution very differently.

I’m Cristina, I’m on the marketing team, and today I’ll be interviewing Chuck. Chuck, you wear a lot of different hats. Can you introduce yourself and some of what you work on?

Chuck: Sure. ⁓ I am technically on the front end team and work on the front end of our search projects, our products, and our subscription products. ⁓ But I ultimately do whatever I need to do to get the job done, which is kind of our DuckDuckGo ethos. I do some product management, some data science, back end engineering. I work with the marketers. It’s fun. ⁓ And I need access. So getting to where lots of them is.

Cristina: Hahaha. Fair enough. Well, thank you. So much like our product philosophy, privacy is core to the ethos of our marketing. There are so many common practices we don’t do, identifying and targeting individual users, retargeting, using behavioral data, using third party cookies and pixels, the list goes on. And we’ve also declined working with a lot of vendors because they don’t meet our privacy standards. As a consumer, that’s something I really appreciate.

But frankly, as a marketer, it makes the job very hard. But it’s getting a bit easier thanks to work from people like Chuck, which is why I was so excited to talk to you today. So Chuck, when you first started working with the marketing team, what was your reaction to our limitations and what we were hoping to achieve?

Chuck: Honestly, I was a little shocked. ⁓ There’s a pretty well-understood playbook for how marketing in a space like this should look. A playbook of tactics and tools that are well-understood. And every company will do it differently, and every brand and product will have their own personality. But we pretty much use none of those tools.

Cristina: Yeah, can you help people understand what the industry norms are for marketing attribution and data and how we do it differently?

Chuck: So when you visit your favorite social media site and it’s trying to decide how to fill the ad slot in your feed, the ad platform will take what it knows about you as a person, your search history, who you follow, and what it knows about your situation, like where you are and who you’re with, and line it up with their ad inventory. They’ll do some very complex math to determine the perfect ad to show you that will maximize profits for the platform and the advertiser. So the more better data they have about you, the better they can target the ads and the more money they can make.

I know that’s something you’ve talked about with Peter on a previous episode, that the financial incentive for the trackers that are ubiquitous online is data that feeds the machine that helps them make more money off of your ad space. That entire ecosystem just flies in the face of our privacy principles. In fact, some of our apps will block those trackers to keep your browsing private. So when we advertise, we refuse to use those tools like you just listed that are common in digital marketing, like retargeting or reporting different types of conversions after the ad click. ⁓ just to protect the privacy of our users. Instead, we’ll collect limited data only when there’s a very clear and urgent rationale for it. And when we do, we’re transparent about what we collect and how we use it. And we’re possibly most important. We’re really careful never to let those logs link two different events to the same person. That’s really difficult to do. ⁓ We have a really fantastic privacy engineering team that reviews every project and their implementation to make sure that the work we’re doing is aligning with our principles.

I’ve also gotten really comfortable making decisions with just the imperfect or incomplete data, trying to identify the solutions that meet 80 % of the business needs without, with 20 % of like the potential input.

Cristina: Yeah, it feels like a lot less than 20 % of what’s actually available to us. Well, yeah. So thank you for unpacking that. That’s a helpful foundation. Can you go a bit deeper and talk about what that looks like in practice at DuckDuckGo?

Chuck: Yeah. That’s probably fair.

Yeah, so we largely ⁓ don’t work with other vendors ⁓ in the marketing space and rely on the tools we own and build ourselves instead. That makes sure that we aren’t incidentally feeding the machine with our own users’ data, which is really easy to do if you’re not careful. ⁓ We have a couple of tools in our toolbox, too. We’ll do as much summarization and analysis of data locally before we ever send it back. So rather than saying that a user of our browser searches

15 times in a day and ⁓ sending 15 different events for those searches, we’ll send a periodic report that will say they searched 15 times during that day. We’ll reduce the precision of those signals even further. So instead of saying that that person made 15 searches, we’ll say they’re a medium volume search user. And then when we do our analysis on an ad campaign, we’ll look at the summaries of the data rather than the raw data ⁓ so that we’re looking across our users rather than the individual humans.

And if it comes down to it, we are willing to redact data that might be too identifying for a person, whether it might contain PII or if it looks too unique and may be able to be traceable back to a person, we’d rather delete it and not use it than jeopardize that person’s privacy.

Cristina: Well, thank you for ⁓ sharing how our ethos really comes to life there. And I’d love for you to touch on one of your claims to fame at DuckDuckGo, which is creating a better, more privacy-respecting system that we call Origin. Can you talk about how you got the idea and how you brought it to life?

Chuck: Yeah, so we were struggling to run small scale campaigns that test new ad platforms or creatives. ⁓ With the tools that we have, the only way that we could do that without jeopardizing user privacy is to run big, broad, expensive, scaled campaigns. But we’re a small company. We want to move nimbly. And that made it really difficult for us to quickly validate our direction and make sure that we were dedicating our resources in the right time or in the right place. So I spent some time with our marketing leaders, including you, Cristina. ⁓

trying to understand the norms and the challenges they were facing, the tools that weren’t in their toolbox. And I brought that to the privacy team. ⁓ We worked backwards, starting with user privacy as a first principle to the business goals and landed on a solution that kind of looks like this. ⁓ You see an ad and you click on it for DuckDuckGo and you install our app from it. When that app first runs, we will send one signal that says that you installed the app from that ad in that location.

And then once a day, we’ll build a summary of those signals that give us pretty coarse insights that say, you know, we had 10 users install our app from that ad on that ad platform on that day. Then we’ll line that data up with other information that the ad platform gives us, like how many impressions there were of the ad and how many times it was clicked and how much that cost us. And that’ll give us some high level insights we can use to start making decisions, like how much it costs us to ⁓ per install from that ad. There’s nothing groundbreaking here technologically.

It’s actually intentionally very simple and that helps us maintain the privacy properties because we have a high elevation view of everything that’s happening. We never share data outside of DuckDuckGo, so we aren’t feeding that machine. There are never person level insights. We’re looking at broad signals across our audiences. There’s no risk of PII and we’re only collecting the data that we need to make those decisions, nothing more. But it still lets our marketing team make informed decisions while working quickly and doing their jobs well.

Cristina: Well, thank you. ⁓ More importantly, thank you for the months and months of work you did on that. ⁓ You say it’s nothing revolutionary, but actually, I think it’s a pretty novel approach. We don’t know of any other companies using technology like this. Typically, they use the entire suite of tools available to them. ⁓ But hopefully, one day, it won’t feel like such a novel approach, and this will become more of the industry standard. At least my naive perspective can hope for that.

Chuck: Of course. I hope so. We’ll see if capitalism agrees with this.

Cristina: So any parting thoughts you’d like to leave on the future of privacy respecting marketing?

Chuck: One of the things that I really love about and appreciate about DuckDuckGo is the example that we set for other companies. ⁓ On the search engine side, could we collect data at massive scale and hyper-target ads to our users? Absolutely, but we don’t need to. And we love being an example of a sustainable business that respects user privacy in their searches. And I like to overlay that to our marketing efforts too. Would we benefit by using really invasive tracking like the industry standards? Yeah, probably, but we don’t need to.

We’re a good example of how you don’t need to participate in that data intensive ecosystem to market your business. And I’m really proud to work on it.

Cristina: Well, thank you, Chuck. I feel the same way. And for those of you listening, if you or someone you know considers themselves to be a privacy-centric marketer, including ad networks and measurement partners, would love to chat, reach out to me on LinkedIn with what you’re doing differently. Chuck, it was really great chatting with you today.

Chuck: Always check, great to chat with you too.

Cristina: Thanks to everyone who took the time to listen. We have so many more episodes planned on a wide variety of topics, so stay tuned. Bye.

In this episode, Gabriel (Founder) and Esteban (Design) discuss AI chat organization, from automatic chat naming to ‘pinning’ your most used chats.

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, welcome to DuckTales. Inside DuckDuckGo features people, et cetera. You got me as the host again, this time I’m the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo. And I got Esteban with me today. Esteban, wanna introduce yourself?

Esteban: Sure. Hi everyone. I’m Esteban. Hi Gabriel. Esteban, I’m a designer in the team.

Gabriel: Sweet. And that’s what we’re talking about today, Duck AI, and in particular, kind of new features we’ve been introducing around conversation organization that Estevan has been designing and working on. And we’ve been releasing kind of a few of these over the last couple of months. You want to just jump in, you want to share your screen and walk us through it. I realize we have some of this on audio now only.

Esteban: Sure.

Gabriel: Let’s also try to describe what we’re seeing while we do it. I’ll do the same thing.

Esteban: Yes, for sure. Let me just share my screen and I’ll walk you through a few of the things that we recently dumped. Yes, so if you’re like me, you have tons of like conversations going on at the same time. What we have seen from users is that people who are very engaged with our platform, they end up having tons of conversations and then sometimes it’s harder to get back to them and to find the one that you needed. So we launched three things. The first one, I’ll show you an example. I was trying to see if I should ask you for a promotion during this podcast. Clearly no. ⁓ But the cool thing was that we, yeah, I will wait for a better time. ⁓ The first thing that we shipped was that we had ⁓ a title, the title of our,

Gabriel: Good answer.

Esteban: Chats were basically the same first prompt. It was just duplicated. That would make it harder to read. So the first thing that we launched was this automatic titling. We’re using the LLM to come up with a better title at the top. So it’s easier to find. ⁓

Gabriel: So this is similar to how ChatGPT and some other competitors are doing it, right? So like we used to do just to repeat, so I understand fully, I think I do, ⁓ having reviewed this when it launched, but just to make sure. ⁓ Yeah, we used to just literally repeat the prompt as your title, like the beginning of the prompt. And so that it was kind of weird sometimes and duplicated sometimes, but now we run in the background something that... ⁓

Esteban: Definitely Right.Yeah.

Gabriel: Summarizes it for you and then automatically does this. You don’t have to do anything, right?

Esteban: Yes. Exactly. And for example, I’m trying a new one. What day is today? That’s my prompt. And then immediately what I get as a title is day to day. The one thing is that sometimes the title is not exactly what you will call it. Like maybe day to day is not super descriptive. So we added this minor option, no? So we can say, I don’t know, day to day, it’s Thursday. Simple but useful.

Gabriel: So if you want to do whatever you want, yeah, like if you don’t like our casing or something, you can put everything in lowercase or whatever, you can just rename it at will, yeah.

Esteban: Yeah. Exactly. Yes, so after you have you want to name stuff, it’s very helpful when you have like several chats about something similar, but you want to have it personalized so it’s easier to find. So super simple, nothing that I don’t know, it’s blowing innovation in a way, but very useful. The second one is we noticed how ⁓ lots of our users were asking us for ways to save conversations and finding the conversations faster. We also have a limit of how many conversations you can have right now. There’s just 30 chats after the 30th chat. The next one gets deleted. We’re working on that, but we wanted to offer a way for you to say what’s important for you and why are the things that you want to come back to it. So I don’t know, this one. Let’s say it’s something that I was working on today, but I want to come back to it.

add it to the top of the list by pinning it. So now it’s pinned at the top and it will always be there. That also means that if DocAI needs to delete one of your chats, it will go to the last one on the list and this one will not get deleted. You can pin up to five chats right now and yeah, it’s always accessible, always at the top, easy to reach.

Gabriel: Got it, so it’s kind of the equivalent of like a favorite or a star or a pin in this case. All of these things are accessible from this three dot hover menu next to the ⁓ chat, chat to the individual chat. And then also you’re saying, is good, that ⁓ because the reason why we have the 30 limit at the moment is because all this is stored locally on your browser. It’s not actually stored on our servers. ⁓

Esteban: Exactly.

Gabriel: we’re working on an encrypted storage that we won’t have the keys to where you can get a much higher limits on it. But at the moment, or if you just want to keep it local, there is a local limit because your browser has storage limits. ⁓ But what this will allow you to do is keep ones around that you really want around, right? So you’re saying if you favorite these or pin them, in our words here, you have a pin section at the top. But if you start making a lot of chats, the non-pin ones will get.

Esteban: second.

Gabriel: kind of blown away first.

Esteban: Exactly. Exactly. ⁓ We have plenty of requests about chat organization and some people are going as far as like, want to create projects, want to create groups, I want to organize my stuff, which it all makes total sense. And I guess up to a point you need those sort of organization tools, but the simple ones will cover most of the needs for most of our users, I would say, because maybe you have a few chats where you keep coming back to them, but then you have a bunch of quick requests, quick checkups with the LLM.

And something like this is super simple. It doesn’t require a lot of effort. And yeah, we hope it helps a lot of our users.

Gabriel: And you mentioned in there a few times like we did this and we’re working on this, these features in particular because we get a lot of user requests for them. ⁓ So speaking to that a little bit, like my understanding is, you know, we get lots of feedback. ⁓ We’re looking through it all and kind of organizing it, like which are the most like important issues to work on. But then also when we launch features, cause to your point, people ask for all sorts of different things. And then we, and like you in particular, design. And you’re like, well, I think this is gonna be a satisfaction of a lot of people’s requests, even if that’s not exactly the thing they asked for. And then we put it out and then how do we know whether it worked or not? Like, what are we looking at?

Esteban: Yes, so to answer your question, we see a usage in particular. We don’t have, of course, data about a particular users, but we know that roughly X amount of people are using this feature. We also know from social media, we got a little bit of love ⁓ after posting that we launched this. And then the other thing that’s a really interesting metric is we see the feedback coming in. ⁓ and comparing with what kind of feedback we were getting a month ago, and we see a big decrease on charge organization requests. As said, there are still things that we can do and we’re working on them, but we see a lot of people, a lot less people requesting for things like this, which is also good news.

Gabriel: I love that metric. mean, because it really is, I guess we are lucky that we have enough users and enough sample size where we can be like, wow, chat organization is a category we can ascribe feedback to. And now it’s like halved or whatever after these features come out, right?

Esteban: Right. Yeah, so something we did for this project that is super interesting, it was fun for me to do was that we have this category, like chat organization, and then we get feedback directly from our users asking for a specific feature. I went and looked into all the feedback that was related to chat organization, and I tried to see why we’re asking for a specific feature. Some of them actually mentioned it, no, I want this so I can do that. And then those needs, I matched them with what type of features will work, even just by naming different types of features. You said that this was sort of favorites or it could be pinning or it could be saved or it could be bookmarked. We also have bookmarks in the browser. So how do we name the feature related to the benefit that I will have and the need that it will solve, but also how much effort will require from the users to actually get the benefit that they were asking for? ⁓ Create projects, it’s a lot of effort.

And they will get a lot of benefit, but not many people are willing to spend time organizing on their chats. But pinning is one tap away So that’s a sort of ⁓ prioritization exercise that we did to define exactly what are the new features that we’re going to launch.

Gabriel: Yeah, that’s a super interesting point because like all different features have different levels of complexity for us to build. And then also for the user to actually use to your point, like I’ve seen, yeah, I’ve seen lots of requests for people wanting really complex things, but then very small percentage of people would actually go through the effort to use those things. Whereas to your point here, pinning, especially the chat title is just automatic. We get that for free to everybody. But then the pinning is just literally just a one click. You don’t have to type in a name for it, a folder name for example. You just get the pinning at the top.

Esteban: Right. And in some cases you actually need to go and give effort to the users in a way, because we thought automatic title would solve the problem. No, like we just add automatic title to everything. That’s it. And then by testing and seeing how some of the titles reacted, we knew that we were, it’s just not going to be bulletproof. Like in some cases you want to have your own title. So we went back and said, okay, let’s add a manual option. ⁓ Cause then we went, then that way we were solving everyone’s needs. Yeah.

Gabriel: You’re like covered. Yeah, you’re covered every, at least there’s a backstop. That’s super interesting. So what’s next, if anything? Are you moving on from chat organization at the moment or are you thinking about some other kind of deeper aspects of it?

Esteban: It’s still there and it’s still one of our top requests. You mentioned that we’re working on finding ways to give you a bigger list of like bigger limits, have more chats, maybe syncing between devices. And we are also thinking about search, of course, ⁓ so you don’t have to read your whole list of chats, just go straight into that answer that you remember. ⁓ from a week ago. So those are things we’re working on and I’m sure there will be plenty more organization features we could do but for the moment that’s a plan.

Gabriel: Sweet. Well, thank you. I’m excited to have you back and someone, maybe I hope I’m the host, but somebody to talk about these more organization features in the future. But yeah, thanks for coming on and thanks everybody for listening. Bye everybody.

Esteban: Okay.

In this episode, Gabriel (Founder) and Julia (People Operations) discuss hack days (our version of a hackathon), how we encourage participation, and some of the product changes it’s led to.

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 everybody. Welcome to Duck Tales again. I’m Gabriel, the founder of DuckDuckGo. And with me today is Julia. Julia, do you want to introduce yourself?

Julia: Yeah, I’m Julia. I am part of the PeopleOps team. Been at DuckDuckGo for three years and a half. So yeah, almost four. Very excited to be here.

Gabriel: That’s cool. Yeah. It feels like a long time. I’m really bad at time. I know I’ve been working with you for a long time. You’re wearing a DuckDuckGo sweater from our... one more swag like that one. Yeah. Nice. Okay. So today we’re here to talk about hack days, which is something, it’s not exactly PeopleOps, but it’s something that you also just work on here. You’ve been responsible for it for a while. So yeah, tell us, tell us what hack days are.

Julia: Yes.

Gabriel: I know they’ve preceded you and I can talk about that too, but talk about your journey with hack days.

Julia: Yeah. So it’s, I love actually owning hack days because it’s not as... it’s related to culture, but not so specific to HR and PeopleOps. But hack days actually, it’s also known or mostly known as hackathons. A lot of companies in the tech industry do them. It’s a combination of the word hack, meaning creative exploratory programming, and marathon, which is something that you do fairly quick and in a short amount of time. So it’s kind of about working very intensively for a short amount of time and see what you can accomplish. It became popular in the late nineties, beginning of two thousands. And we just happened to call it a little differently. So we call it hack days. At DuckDuckGo, the way that we do that is about three or four weeks throughout the year. We do our hack days. It’s from Wednesday to Friday. So from Wednesday to Friday, we allow folks to just put all their regular work duties on the side, on pause, and using good judgment, of course, and work on anything they want that relates to DuckDuckGo. So full creativity, autonomy, and collaborating with other folks and in other domains. So that’s what it is.

Gabriel: Yeah, so a couple things with it. One is we, you do your largest part of this, so tell me what you think about this, but we’ve really tried to encourage people to do it too. So you don’t have to do it. I mean, that’s one thing, you can continue working your normal working day, but we’ve really tried to encourage as many people as we can to participate and also as we’ve grown to collaborate with others. With the idea being here that when you step away for those kind of three days, you know, without the constraints of like regular project scoping and oversight, and you just kind of left to like build from scratch, you can come up with and try new ideas. And especially if you collaborate and cross-pollinate, and as a result, I mean, we’ll talk about this, but a lot of good things have come about it. So we’ve been really trying to encourage people, but I think some people are kind of reluctant to do that. Worried they’re going to fall behind on their work or whatever. So yeah, so maybe you can speak to how we try to encourage people.

Julia: Yeah, it’s an interesting part of... So our culture has a lot of autonomy and one of our values is to build trust. So we treat people with trust, we trust folks when they are hired, we trust our hiring process. So we know they’re going to use good judgment, they’re going to put their work on the side if they can, they’re going to keep doing the things that they have to do and balance things out. But it is interesting because as folks come from other organizations, they do have... like some folks, some people have a fear of like, no, I’m going to leave my work behind. I don’t know how this works. Like, is it going to be okay if I actually put it on hold? Thankfully, we’ve been doing it for a while and a lot of people participate. So I feel like after you’ve gone through the first one and you see how many people participate, you’re like, this is actually a big thing here. And it’s cool to do it. So we try to motivate in a way that we build our culture, just like letting people know, like we trust you. We trust you and you can make that judgment call. We’re all grownups here. We all know it’s a business. We all know what we have to do. So it’s, I think that’s the way that we motivate. We also try to ask people to plan ahead. So we remind folks when we post the whole calendar of the hack days in the beginning of the year. So folks already know when that’s going to happen and they can kind of make sure that things that are more pressing in their regular work is taken care of in advance. And we announce a couple of weeks before it happens, so folks also have that just as a reminder. So those are some of the things that we do to motivate them. And they can also, if they’re not able to do the hack days that week, they can actually make it up to hack days in another week. So if that week actually just becomes something like, you know what, now I have to actually focus on my work, I won’t be able to pause things, they can do that in another week that seems more suiting for them.

Gabriel: Yeah, I was going to mention that if you didn’t, because it’s a subtle thing that we eventually did. I think another subtle one, but it’s just, it’s not even something we’ve done, but to your point, since so many people participate, is a lot of the leadership also participates. And I think, yeah, and I participate sometimes. And so when people see that, I think it may give more permission for people to do so, you know? Yeah, exactly.

Julia: You participate! Yeah, that’s an example thing.

Gabriel: And then on the other side of it, I know we’re gonna wrap this up, but maybe not as a good time, is like, you know, I agree, we have a good cadence now of like encouragement and lead up and stuff, but then the end of it is also kind of fun, as like kind of the end of the hack days. So what happens at the end of hack days?

Julia: Well, so we do hack days for several reasons, but one of the reasons is engagement. And one of the really cool things about hack days is you have from Wednesday to Friday, for those who don’t know, every Friday at DuckDuckGo, we have an all-company meeting. So we all get together. We talk about company updates. It’s kind of like what a town hall, a traditional town hall call would look like, but with our cool twist. So for hack days weeks, we actually try to, we cancel all the other meetings and that’s the only one that stays. And during that meeting, we have a showcase specifically for hack days. So that week is just about the showcase. We allow folks to talk about what they worked on for two minutes. We actually have to time it, which is kind of, it’s one of the things that...

Gabriel: We have a lot of people now. Yeah. Yeah.

Julia: I do not like. I’ve been really hard not to interrupt people and to just let them do it, but we are growing as an organization, so it becomes quite challenging as we grow the amount of hack days demos that we have. But during that call, you just get to listen to everything that folks created in three days. And it’s really fascinating because you get to see, well, for me, for example, I’m not in the tech team, so it’s really interesting to see how tech folks are thinking about the product, what are they doing to make things better? And from any other domain, you just get to see how people work and how fast they can accomplish things and how, you get to know more of the products because obviously they’re demoing things. So it’s kind of a win-win even if you don’t participate because you just get to learn a bunch and you just leave that call so motivated and so inspired because you get to see we are really a big bunch of like really smart people who are overachievers. So it’s really crazy what we can achieve like in three days. And it’s just like beautiful to see and you just leave that call feeling proud and feeling inspired and then you get your own ideas from it and you get to reach out to the folks who worked on things that you found interesting and just like talk to them about your feedback on that. So that is really special and I think that is the most special and impactful part of hack days, aside from, of course, the fact that it ends up impacting our products because several things are shipped and also internal processes are improved throughout those projects. So, yeah, it’s really exciting and really beautiful to see.

Gabriel: Yeah, agreed. I mean, let’s talk about that last part for a bit. So you can work on anything. We don’t even say you need to work on something that needs to ship. You know, like people can work on kind of pie in the sky ideas or little improvements they want to make. But some people do work on either internal improvements for like work process or development process or actual changes in the product that do end up shipping or spark ideas that end up shipping. And we do encourage that. I mean, so we had one, I’m just thinking of the Duck Tales episodes we did. We did one episode with, I think with Rachel, with the AI, no AI image filter that came out of hack days. Are there any others that jump out to you of like projects we did the last year or so that we ended up shipping?

Julia: Oh yes. I love that one. It’s so interesting that you say that because that is one of my favorites, basically, as someone who creates some imaging myself, as someone as an artist myself, I actually really appreciate that functionality of being able to filter out AI images and just be able to see what was actually created by humans. So I love that one. There are many, many things that I think were impactful. In the internal processes piece, it’s hard to say it because I would have to explain the actual process.

Gabriel: There’s been a lot of good internal improvements though. Yeah, like people make people’s lives easier. Yeah.

Julia: Yes, for sure. And there are small things like, for example, the automation that we did for when you’re out of the office, you actually get to update all your tools at once instead of having to go one by one. That’s really impactful and saves a bunch of time. We also had one for that you can just read the title of an Asana task in Mattermost, which saves a bunch of time so you don’t have to click to see what it is. So these small tweaks that are really important. From the product perspective, I think there was one about hiding distracting items from any website that I think is really, is very connected to what we do in our ethos of like user-first approach and giving people optionality. Also like vertical tabs. I feel like it’s one that folks ask for a lot. So that’s cool.

Gabriel: Yeah, the last hack days we had tons of vertical tab projects. We haven’t shipped those yet, but I think they will be coming and people will be very excited about that when we do.

Julia: Yes, we’re excited about those. I feel like it’s a big one and people love it. And I think, did the Easter eggs come from hack days?

Gabriel: Oh yeah, yes I did. Yeah, yeah, that’s true. I forgot about that. That was the project that I worked on.

Julia: That’s a favorite. Everybody loves it and gives a bunch of ideas. I think that’s really fun and very delightful. So yeah, some of it, but you probably know way more because you’ve been doing this for...

Gabriel: No, those are just a good example. So yeah, I mean, the point I just had was like, yeah, I think without really even trying, people really do improve things and we should kind of ship them and they make them into the product. I guess we could end with something about hack days are part of what we’ve been calling special days, or I don’t know if you’ve changed the name of that, but I think that’s what we still call it. And kind of like, it started with just hack days a long time ago before you joined, but then we had tried some other things too. Like we basically found that like, you know, about a quarter, four times a year is the right cadence for hack days, but there’s still some needs for other days to kind of take some time apart from regular work. And at some point in the past we had called them low-hanging fruit days or quick wins days. And it was kind of like these things that kind of fall through the cracks that maybe take just a few days or even you can knock out a bunch in a few days, but that we never end up doing because they’re small little tasks and they just don’t get prioritized. So that’s evolved, it’s evolved since you’ve been here too, but now maybe you could talk about what we do in the other months just briefly. Like I think we’re just calling this quick win days now, right?

Julia: Yeah, so for the sake of everybody who is listening, at DuckDuckGo we have something that we call special days. So special days is the umbrella terminology for hack days and quick wins. I feel a little bit bad for quick wins because hack days has way more hype to it. It’s a known terminology in other places.

Gabriel: Yeah. Just like this episode, we’re tacking it on to the end, but I think it’s still important just to mention because it’s an interesting concept that we’ve come up with.

Julia: For sure, for sure. So quick win days basically are things that you can do quickly. So it’s the same concept in a sense that it’s from Wednesday to Friday and you get to like pause certain work using good judgment and work on quick wins and things that you can accomplish really quickly or within that timeframe. I also do want to mention though that some things initiate as a hack days or a quick win. And then we realize the potential of that idea. And even if the person cannot end or finalize the whole thing in three days, we might just keep going because after the showcase, we realized the impact of it. So we have a very structured way that we work at DuckDuckGo. So having that space for creativity is really important. So going back to quick wins, those days are pretty much about getting low-hanging fruit taken care of. And a lot of people, a lot of our functional teams actually plan around it a lot. So what they do is that when they are working on specific projects and they see quick wins within those projects, they kind of just separate that for when we have the quick wins. And then they get a bunch of stuff done. So that’s really exciting because it becomes very productive. And it becomes a conversation within the teams. Like what are the small improvements that we can do in specific things or what are the little steps that we can go beyond in certain projects? So it actually becomes really impactful to have those days. So right now, as we evolved hack days and special days in general, we have tried to combine them. We have tried them separately. We have tried having themes connected to them. So at some point, the themes were connected to our objectives, which are our project roadmaps that are contributing to our top priorities and organization. So we have tried several things. Right now, what we do is that we have them separately, and it’s every two months. So basically, you have three hack days, three hack weeks a year and three quick win weeks a year. We try to skip weeks that are super busy like when we have our performance review process or things like that, people are involved in giving feedback. But yeah, that’s basically what those are. Also have recently implemented the... the difference with quick wins is that we don’t have the showcase, but we do tell people like, you worked on something really cool, do a demo. There’s always room for demos in our company meetings. So that’s really fun. And we are trying to increase that. And we also try to encourage people to work on not necessarily create something or work on something, but also learn something. So if there is a different domain that you want to learn about, or if there is... right now, we are highly encouraging people to test AI capabilities and what it can do, how far can it go? What are things that we can accomplish with it? What are the different tools that are out there that we can use? So quick wins also serve that purpose a lot. Like you don’t have to create something, just like learn, explore, do things that are going to help you do better work. So yeah, for hack days, we also implemented Hack Days Awards, which is one of the reasons why there’s a bit more of a hype with hack days than quick wins. So at this point we have an award, we have four awards.

Gabriel: You...

Julia: They are connected to what we’re trying to do with our product. So delight, dependability, and discovery. And then we have a fourth one for improving internal processes. And you, Gabriel, select the winners, which is really exciting for folks to just have that. And yeah, we give them a prize. We have swag that’s with special logos for our hack days. So that’s really exciting. We love swag at DuckDuckGo. So that is something that motivates people.

Gabriel: Heh heh heh.

Julia: Yeah, so I hope that answered your question about quick wins.

Gabriel: Okay, last thing, last thing. Yeah, it totally did. And part of the reason I asked was, I like about quick wins days is too, what you said is it’s not just engineering. Like it’s very clear that anyone has quick tasks across all the functional teams. Because with hack days, and this is maybe a problem with the name, like I think people assume it’s just engineering, but we have really tried to encourage non-engineering. And to your last point there, I’ll make this point that if you can... you can add anything for us to close out if you want. You know, we have been encouraging people to learn new things or use AI and I feel like AI has now really opened up in the last few days a clear path for even more non-engineers to get involved. Like, John, who’s been on this before, did his automations for... anyone can now like make automations or even build a small website and just try different things.

Julia: Yes.

Gabriel: And my hope is that we get even more kind of non-engineering, product design folks doing stuff.

Julia: Yeah, it’s so interesting because usually when we’re trying to automate something, we ask IT, like we, as in PeopleOps and folks who are not tech, that are in the non-tech teams, we usually need support to automate anything. And now we’re like able to automate things ourselves. And it’s really exciting. So we’re kind of like, are we, are we coding now? Yeah, I like it. Coding.

Gabriel: Yeah, yeah, you are.

Julia: And I mean, of course it’s all very basic stuff that we’re doing still as people who are not in tech, but it’s really exciting to see what you can accomplish with AI and what you can accomplish with just having that autonomy and freedom to just go and do it and do it yourself. And it’s all about curiosity, which is one of the things that I really love about hack days and the freedom that you get. It’s, you really, you can work on anything and you can explore anything and you can go in any team and be like, hey, I want to learn something about finance or the legal department or whatever. And just like actually be able to explore and get out. Even the folks who are in tech get out of the tech zone and kind of explore other things they can be impactful with. And so yeah, I love hack days. I think it’s super exciting. Like we, at some point we had less frequency and people had a very emotional response to it. So it’s clear to me that people really love it and that it has a huge impact. We have an engagement survey question about hack days and it’s usually pretty positive. So yeah, I’m very proud of the program. We do have some challenges like the growth and how we’re gonna manage the amount of demos and all of that, but I’m super happy to own it. And this was really exciting. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here. It’s fun to talk about.

Gabriel: Yes, thank you for coming. I also love hack days and thank you everyone for listening. See you next time.

Julia: Thank you. Bye.

In this episode, Peter (Product), Stephen (Design) and Balint (Windows) discuss updates to our browsers, from the most popular custom themes, to why over 40% of our iOS users have made DuckDuckGo their system-wide password manager.

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.

Peter: Hi, and welcome to DuckTales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, the technology, and the people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from DuckDuckGo employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, and more recently, approaches to AI as well. My name is Peter. I am on the product team at DuckDuckGo, often working on our browsers, which we’ll talk about today. And joined here today, I have my colleague Stephen.

Stephen: Steven, work on the product design team.

Peter: And Balint.

Balint: Hey, I’m on the Windows Developer Team.

Peter: Awesome, and today we’re going to talk a little bit about our browsers, as I mentioned. So many people don’t know we have browsers. They’ve come to know us through DuckDuckGo Private Search, which of course you can use in any browser. But we’ve for many years offered browsers on iOS and Android devices. And more recently, in the last few years, we’ve expanded that to Windows and Mac desktop computers as well. Our browsers are amongst the most popular in the market. For example, in the United States on iPhones, we are the most popular browser after Safari, which comes built in, and the Chrome browser, which of course many people have come to know over the years. So our browsers are used by lots of different people. When we started building our browsers and as we expanded our browsers to desktop computers, we started to prioritize the features and functionality in our browsers based on sort of two things. One, having privacy at their core. Of course, that’s our brand promise, and we want to deliver on that. But also, we wanted to make sure our browsers were easy to use replacements for the privacy invasive browsers that people have been using for many years. And so we prioritize a lot of features based on what would make it easier to use. We base it on people’s feedback, which we’ll talk about a little bit more. And often internally, we talk about focusing the features we build on the three Ds. We call that dependability, discoverability, and delight. The features should just work. It should be easy to find. And they should be delightful if we’re doing them right. So today, we’re going to talk about a couple different browser capabilities that fall into a few of these buckets that we thought would be interesting to share a little bit about. First, we’ll talk about custom theming. Stephen, do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Stephen: Yeah, custom theming to me is pretty simple. It’s where you can go into your browser and just choose which color you want to use. It can be that green or blue or purple. I think we have a range of colors to pick from.

Peter: And why did we build custom theming?

Stephen: Originally, we didn’t plan to. We were going to try to keep it simple and just have a light and a dark mode. But we got into it we discovered that people really like to customize their UI. It’s just like a fun way to make browsing more fun and personalized. And they really like that. And it also can help you pick your browser out from other browsers. So it’s really also a functional improvement.

Peter: Do you want to give us a little bit of a demo on how that works?

Stephen: So we built two ways to get into this. If you’re on the new tab screen, you can open the customized sidebar and we have a theme picker up here with a few colors. You can pick gray or blue or green, purple. Lots of people love purple. And you can also change the theme from light to dark or just to use whatever the system decides. So we support all of these. And if you want, you can also change the new tab background screen to be separate from the rest. And we’ve spent quite a bit of time making sure that this works on all surfaces. So you can see it in the settings and the bookmarks in the history and elsewhere. Also, we have a neat little feature here where you can change the app icon and the dock to match the theme. So that’s a little more continuity and a little more fun added to the feature.

Peter: Stephen, were there any challenges in building this as we started to introduce it?

Stephen: Yeah, so like I said, we didn’t really have themes on the roadmap when we started. So we kind of had to go back and rethink the way we were styling things and build a whole theme system so that we could apply a bunch of different themes and make sure that it was, we could have more themes in the future. So now it’s all centralized and easy to work with. So we could probably add more or maybe even enable customization at some point, user customization.

Peter: And would you say, what’s the response been from our users so far?

Stephen: It’s been pretty positive so far. We got a lot of feedback saying, thank you for adding this. And it’s been pretty positive and monitoring people using it. It’s going up. So that’s good.

Peter: And you’re saying the certain colors were the most popular, I think you mentioned earlier.

Stephen: Yeah, so I think the most popular color is, let’s see, it’s sleet blue, I think. And then the second most popular color was violet. It’s kind of neck and neck there. Personally, desert is my favorite, but it was not the most popular.

Peter: Got it. Cool. Where are we going next with it?

Stephen: We’re looking into adding a dark mode for web pages that don’t have it, which is going to be pretty interesting. And like I said, we may, depending on if we get more feedback on how many themes we have, how many colors we ship with by default or expand that out to letting people choose their own colors.

Peter: Yeah, the dark mode for sites to use dark mode, that’s starting to roll out. We have that on mobile devices, on Android starting to roll out on iOS. And it’s something, as you said, we’re looking at on our desktop browser. So I think our users can look forward to that in the near future, which is awesome. Great. Let’s talk about password management next. Maybe Balint start with what is a password manager? Maybe people don’t realize that in their browsers they have typically password managers. Maybe just grab that at a high level first.

Balint: So the password manager is the thing that comes up when you go to a login screen and the browser offers you to fill your username and password automatically. And it’s a critical piece of feature because one of the most dangerous attack vectors used to be credential stuffing where an attacker got hold of your passwords from one site. And if you have been reusing the same password on other sites, they could just brute force. They could just try the same password with your username on other sites and usually get a hit. And the password manager is a perfect defense against this sort of attack because it takes the burden of having to memorize passwords off your back.

Peter: That makes sense. Yeah, I guess, you know, over the last 10 years, a lot of you hear a lot about third party password managers like 1Password or Bitwarden or LastPass and more people are using those. But I think it’s probably safe to say that most people use their browser as their password manager. Maybe they don’t even recognize that it is a password manager, but it is, as you’re describing overall. Why did we choose to sort of build it into the browser and start to build out a lot of those capabilities? Is it because that is the easiest way for people to protect themselves, as you’re describing?

Balint: I think it matches perfectly well with the 3Ds that we have. So it’s a core part of dependability. You want your online experience to just work, not have to memorize passwords and not have to think about where those passwords are stored. Of course, if you explicitly want to, you can use a password manager, but it is very nice to have a secure default built right into the browser. And we take care of the whole lifecycle. So when you register to a new site, our browsers will suggest secure passwords, which are randomly generated and long enough, take care of storing them, and if you turn on sync, can get your passwords synced across your different devices so you don’t have to re-enter them on every single device you have.

Peter: And we’ve had the core capabilities in our browser product for some time. What’s been the user response and maybe describe where we’re going with it next.

Balint: So we see on our anonymized dashboards that uptake for these password managers is very high and we keep adding new features. For example, recently over the past months, we have shipped a feature for Android and iOS devices where you can use DuckDuckGo’s password manager as the main system password manager and you can fill passwords in other applications from the DuckDuckGo database. And uptake for that feature has been phenomenal. We have almost half. So a bit more than 40% of our iOS users enabling us as their primary system-wide password manager. We have more cool features in the works. My personal favorite is something that is called TOTP. It is that six digit number you see on certain websites, which is used as a second factor authentication. This is something that many password managers already offer, but browsers don’t really tend to. We would be one of the first on the market to ship this. And it would present a second security layer that is much harder to phish, so much harder to steal than a conventional password.

Peter: And do you think we’ve hit challenges in building this along the way? And what are some of those challenges?

Balint: Certainly. So password management is all about security and figuring out a way that lets us store the information on the devices securely in a way that we can access them, but an attacker cannot access them. And we have been very proactive in using operating system level security features. For example, on Windows, we are storing them in a way that is secured by Windows Hello. So that is Windows’s own built-in encryption mechanism. So breaking our password manager is similar in difficulty to cracking Windows’s own encryption, which makes it a pretty hard target.

Peter: That makes sense. So when a user goes to access a stored password, that’s why the browser will cause Windows to trigger the Windows Hello authentication overall. Makes sense. And then you talked a lot about storing all these passwords. And, you know, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of people don’t know that we even offer browsers to start with. And so if they come to us and install our browser for the first time after many years of using another browser, presumably they’ll have a lot of passwords in that other browser that they need to get into our browser somehow. Maybe we can talk about that and how we’ve been iterating on the import capability, so a little bit.

Balint: Exactly. So we offer an import capability which you can do as part of onboarding. So when you first come to our browser, one of the onboarding steps is the offer to import your stuff, but you can also do it later on from main, from more tools and import on Windows. Similar logic is available on our other platforms as well. And one of the recent additions to this has been the so-called multi-import where you can very simply select not just one target or one source, but several of them, we can import directly from the most popular browsers on the market. And it’s been trimmed as well. So if everything goes well, it is just one or two clicks and you are done. We support importing passwords and also bookmarks. And this also sees pretty good uptake. So once we have updated the visuals for this multi-import, we have been seeing 13% more people choosing to import and over 70% more stuff getting imported, so 70% more passwords and bookmarks. And that is pretty good news because it reduces the friction. So when you come to DuckDuckGo, you don’t have to restart your digital life from scratch. Instead, you can continue from where you left off, except in a more private manner, of course.

Peter: That’s awesome. Yeah, my experience is, you know, over the years, people tend to often use more than one desktop browser, sometimes one for work, sometimes one for personal or for separation of different context. So the fact that we make it easy in one step to import from multiple at a time seems to be really beneficial and delightful to users overall. That’s great.

Balint: Yeah, and we are also innovating on our mobile platforms as well. So for example, we have been first to market with a feature that lets you import from mobile browsers directly. So not via a desktop browser that gets synced to your mobile version as well, but directly on the mobile browser itself. And we are planning to take care of the newly released iOS API, which will further streamline imports on the iOS platform.

Peter: That’s great. Yeah, we have that both on iOS where you can import from Safari and then we also have directly imported from the Google password manager on Android, which is great for people. Awesome. Well, thank you, Balint. Thank you, Stephen. I think as a summary, what I’ll say is if you are using our browsers or if you’re not and you choose to start to use them, we’d love to hear your feedback. We do very much listen to user feedback. There’s ways right in the product to send us feedback. You can fill out the form. We absolutely look at those, read those. If you go on our subreddit and discuss our browsers and capabilities there. We absolutely look at those threads and we take all of that as input to help make prioritization decisions about the features we’re building. So thank you very much and see you next time on DuckTales.

Balint: See you.

In this episode, Gabriel (Founder) and Zac (SVP, Insights) discuss AI adoption, common user concerns, and why we’re building AI that users can control and customize.

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, welcome back to Duck Tales. I’m Gabriel, founder of DuckDuckGo. I have with me today Zac Pappis.

Zac: Yep, I’m Zac. I’ve been here for about 14 years now, so I think we’ve had the pleasure of working together for a very long time. And we’re on our insights team, so generally doing a lot of market research or user research and generally trying to give us better insight into what our customers and future customers want.

Gabriel: Cool, and yeah, happy to have you. And we’ve been friends for 15 years. But we are going to talk about AI today. You’ve done a lot of research in AI over the last year. And we obviously recently put out this kind of Yes AI, No AI public poll. And we’ve talked about AI a few times on the show here, just in terms of product, but also just more generally. So our approach to AI has been a bit different than the other tech companies. Obviously we’re asking people if they want AI, no one seems to ever be doing that. But more generally our approach is to make AI features that are private, of course, because we’re a privacy company, useful, which I think lots of customers have different opinions on what AI is useful and what is not useful across all sorts of products. And most importantly, I think to this discussion, optional. So we’re making all of our AI features optional. You can turn them off or tune them, actually. We’re going to get into that too. So that’s been our approach, private, useful, optional. And we thought we would talk about, with you today, who’s been actually doing a lot of research with consumers and looking at other research, kind of how those three things kind of thread through the research. So if we were gonna, you know, obviously that’s a big topic, maybe we can start at the highest level and work our way down. Like, yeah, highest level landscape of AI right now, kind of like what are you seeing in all of the research trends that you’re looking at?

Zac: Yeah, I mean, generally, I think what we feel just as being consumers and people downstream of a lot of technology is that it’s been pushed on us as well as the general market, despite not really asking if we wanted it. And the market moves so fast that I think we feel the consumer has been left behind and no one really ever got an informed choice or consent into how prevalent AI has become in every product. And we think that’s a mistake, right? So for users and the companies that are building it, that choice as you laid it out is to make these things really truly useful and optional and of course, private. But that’s not what we’ve seen. And I don’t think that’s how most people have felt in terms of the ways that the companies have rolled these products into, or I should say rolled them out to their broader consumer base. Lots of tech companies have put AI overviews into products or turned AI on by default without really asking for consumer consent. It really reminds me a lot of what had happened through the 2010s and the cookie era or social logins or a lot of cases where technology just sort of appeared for people without a lot of demand for it or really a lot of cost to use it or a lack of concern into how exactly their data was going to be used or how would it impact the usefulness of the product they were using.

Gabriel: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, giving them the best intentions, like, even though we kind of just screwed the approach, I think somebody saw a lot of people’s assumptions seem to be it was super useful and everyone’s going to love this. And I think to some degree it’s turned out not as useful for lots of people in different scenarios. And then some people just don’t want it shoved down their throat. You know, they would like the choice. They might use it anyway. So with that in mind, like, I know you actually — so like that’s kind of the general consumer sentiment, but like in terms of like actual adoption, like data points, where are you, what are you seeing right now?

Zac: Yeah, so we see that this is everywhere. We also see that people are using it a lot. Some studies that we have looked at and run ourselves, as well as those that we’ve evaluated from external companies and polling services, or things like Pew had run a study in June of last year showing that there is a lot of variability when it comes to who is using AI and who has a strong preference for it. A good example might be that 29% of parents use AI daily, but 15% of non-parents use it. And that’s almost twice the rate from parents and non-parents that are using it. That’s just the type of disparity, I think, that we see across different consumer types. So older or younger, more educated, less educated, there is a real preference and usage gap between these groups. And that doesn’t mean that this product is going to be right or the specific implementation is going to be right for everybody. And so that level of specificity or attenuation for exactly how the product appears to people is really important to us. So despite the fact that you have lots of parents, 30% of parents using AI daily, I think even more, 50% of Americans are actually concerned, more concerned than excited about AI. And that’s gone up over the last few years. So you have these two things happening. You have a lot more exposure and usage of AI and more familiarity with it. But as people are becoming more familiar with it, their concern is going up. And that to us is evident that someone’s really living with a choice that they didn’t really get to make.

Gabriel: Yeah. Well, I think one thing is usually said in there and it goes to some other data points I’ve seen very recently, correct me if I’m wrong, but there was another Pew that came out really recently on teenagers and it was about, I think about half the teenagers were kind of regular daily users. And then there was another one, just about ChatGPT usage and it was like maybe 40% of desktop people were weekly users. What I see on that is I do see that’s obviously very significant adoption in three or four years. However, that’s still like majority of people close are not daily users. You know, so like the one headline I take from what you said and what I’ve seen is that yes, there is a lot of adoption, but this idea that everyone’s using it all the time is that narrative just seems not true. And it relates to your concern points. Like the people who are using it are concerned. People who aren’t using it are also very concerned. And so there’s just like generally a building concern. There are obviously lots of different issues people have with AI. So like, how do you like think about that concern? If you kind of try to piece it apart, like, where are people expressing, how are people expressing that concern, I guess, and how is it related to their...

Zac: Yeah. I think it’s something that we know pretty well because we’ve seen a similar type of concern with tech overreach before. Just some stats that we have on hand to share because I did look into this a little bit before today. There was a study by Resilience [CHECK] in December, so pretty recent, December 2025, showing 54% of those polled, US adults that they surveyed, have avoided AI-powered features. And in our own polling of US adults, we’ve seen something closer to like 13% of people actively disabling AI search or browser features in their browser to protect themselves. And when we look more deeply at why people are doing that, taking, you know, kind of these extra steps either to tune or to completely avoid the way that AI has been integrated into their products, we see a couple of, I should say, familiar concerns. There is a concern that companies are rolling these new technologies into their products so quickly that they come with new types of privacy trade-offs or data security concerns. And of course, we’ve seen that in the past with Cambridge Analytica and other cases where a lot of data collection can just increase the surface area, the risk surface area for having that data. So when asked why people were avoiding AI or were turning these features off, I think 51% had said they reduced data sharing because of AI, meaning a behavior that they’re taking to proactively not share as much as a result of AI being in the product. And when asked what they wanted, the majority of answers from those folks were opt-out rights, data traceability, and disclosure. None of those things are no AI. They’re consistent more with a theme that would be control, right? Not no AI. They just want to know when it’s being used, how it’s being used, and to have some input and flexibility into where it’s applied to the product.

Gabriel: Yeah, I mean, those seem like totally legitimate concerns to us. I think more broadly, like what I’m hearing is, I mean, that’s, privacy is one of the main concerns people have. That’s obviously why we’re building private AI and giving people that control. The second is that people do want options to your point. It’s not just yes or no. It’s, like, yes, some people, but it’s a smaller percentage like you pointed out, totally want to get rid of all AI because maybe they have more objections for various reasons. But it seems like the majority of people actually just want it to be useful and private. So what’s useful to somebody may not be useful to another person. And so if there are 10 AI features, maybe they want to engage with six out of 10. Maybe they want to turn the dials on them a little bit different. And so it’s like this broader customization of AI thing to make it useful that we’re trying to do with our search features that I don’t think other companies have approached in the same way. They’re just kind of like all on all the time, you know?

Zac: Yeah, exactly. Funny enough, there was an Ernst & Young study pretty recently, it might have been January or February of this year. It was a poll of 500 or so US business leaders, so people in an executive position or director position in some kind of a large company. I think these were all companies of over 40,000 employees or something pretty large. And from that survey, 78% of the company leaders polled said that their adoption is outpacing their ability to do good risk management. And 45% of the same people polled said they had a confirmed or suspected data leak via these unauthorized AI tools. So they’re really prioritizing speed over the exhaustive vetting that they would need to do to either ensure that they’re actually producing something that’s safe, both from a privacy and security standpoint, and also useful, that they’re getting it into a product really without understanding user needs or how the product is being adopted by those who are really core to their business.

Gabriel: Yeah, that’s actually a really good point. I mean, it’s like we expect these numbers that we’re citing to change over time, right? And you’re already seeing that like concern could go down if you address people’s needs for transparency and control and also concern could go down as people discover, you know, actually useful features and how they’re using it. I think part of the issue is there hasn’t been that control and transparency. And then part of the issue is I think to that last point is things are intentionally moving too fast for people and change, you know, it takes time to understand these technologies, to get good risk management, to like get good processes in place that, you know, don’t exploit your data and have other security and privacy risks. And so, like, I imagine that longer term, some of this will settle down, but it feels, I guess, probably not the level, it just — if I were to summarize some of this, it just feels like it’s moving too fast for people a bit and that everything needs to slow down a little bit.

Zac: Yeah, I mean, it’s just kind of spitballing here, but it seems almost like a double-edged sword. You both have people who are in charge of making these types of product decisions, rushing them out the door without fully understanding them. And then as consumers who are also, you know, privy to, or I guess experiencing the downstream effect of other product changes, we feel it. So you’re getting this double whammy of having to participate if you’re somebody that works in any industry right now, which probably a lot of them are impacted by AI. It’s likely that your organization is dealing with a lot of these same challenges, not really having the right oversight or internal expertise to understand the risks. A lot of pressure from the market and competitors moving so quickly and you feel like you’re going to get left behind. And it’s understandable why some people might feel like the industry or the changes are moving faster than they can really make sense of them. And I think that’s what we feel both as people somewhat responsible for creating consumer technology, but also as consumers ourselves. We see them in the products that we use every day from Apple and Microsoft, et cetera.

Gabriel: Yeah, well, let’s take a few minutes to just talk about our Yes AI, No AI campaign we did. So we put out this essentially public poll. It really wasn’t to our users, and I’ll get to that in a second, about asking, are you Yes AI or No AI? And we understand, we just talked about how it’s all nuanced and it’s about control. So we understand it’s a bit of a binary kind of thing that we’re asking people to choose, but it was kind of like, your finger in the air, just kind of say what side you’re on. Now part of that was because we think that the people who are concerned inside just haven’t had a lot of voice. They haven’t really been listened to. So this was a bit of an attempt to allow and show that and have an opportunity for a tech company to kind of listen and see what’s out there. Obviously the poll ended up very skewed. Interesting though, is like overall numbers were like 85-15, something like that. But if you look when you polled our actual users on like a platform, it was more like 50-50. And what happened was the whole poll went viral in the No AI community. And kind of my theory is, you know, not a lot of people are speaking to this community. We did. And so it went viral there when there’s everyone speaking to the Yes AI community. They don’t really have a reason to vote Yes AI, you know, but people really do want to express their No AI vote. So I thought it was interesting. We didn’t really know what to expect. That was the hypothesis. And that’s really what happened. You know, it seemed like, I guess, I guess my read on it and tell me what you think is like, I think some people are out there and maybe listening to this and being like, I still don’t believe there’s no AI sentiment here. And it’s like, I think we’re here to say, yes, there is, you know, like we have so many data points here that show there’s a large percent of people who are concerned with different AI things.

Zac: Yeah, exactly. The campaign was awesome. And I know it’s not something that we typically do. So it’s great to see just a response from it. But it was really meant, I think, to point out, correct me if I’m wrong, the gap that we didn’t, that no one really gave consumers a choice for. So this gap between yes and no, where most people aren’t in this absolutist camp. Even if I think you have some anti-AI sentiments, it’s more than likely, I guess, just given a kind of a bell curve that for most people, they fall somewhere in the middle. It can be useful for some things, you know, in certain conditions or if, you know, it’s kind of an opt-in or something that really is explicit for the user. But in other cases, maybe not. And I think the experience that this campaign had kind of really drawn on was what we talked about earlier, just a flood of AI without really a lot of ramp up and consumers not really getting a choice to speak out about it. And that certainly, as you pointed out, the people who were really pro AI were kind of getting the life that they wanted to live in and the world was really bending in their direction. But the No AI crowd probably didn’t see or kind of people on the other parts of that bell curve didn’t really see anything coming for them. They felt probably like it was and it’s still seemingly like an AI-powered world that we’re heading into. But without understanding what that is, it’s certainly scary. And certainly with the other concerns that we’ve seen in the data that we’ve just shared here today, there are privacy concerns. There are systemic concerns and how that’s going to impact the rest of the products that they use. So if it’s something that’s getting built into Amazon, how does it impact my Echo device? How does this data migrate from one process or one product to another? And all of that, I think, just comes in tenfold with AI because it is such a sensitive topic for people. And the type of content that you engage with in AI is uniquely different from, say, something that you would type into your browser. It’s a lot more personal, it’s a lot deeper, and certainly from the history that has grown from that, it can be too personal for people and really jeopardize a lot of the concerns, bring a lot of concerns forward that they had in the past with cookies and just general corporate tracking. So one thing that I think ours does really well that we’ve seen a lot of positive response for is the fact that you can use it with no accounts. You can just go to duck.ai and start using it. No accounts, it’s not training on your data, you can stop using it when you want, you can turn it off if you’d like, and all of that optionality and that level of control is just not something I think we have seen in any other product. So it would be interesting to see.

Gabriel: Yeah, agreed. And people have asked specifically on the back of that campaign, kind of what are we doing? And it’s important to say, well, first of all, all that optionality was built in already before we did that. So you could have turned Duck AI off completely from search. You can turn Search Assist off within our search results on Duck AI itself. You can choose what model provider you want. Like you don’t have an account, like you said. But I’d say additionally, we also created this domain, noai.duckduckgo.com, as well as yesai.duckduckgo.com. And those have now built in like all AI on and all AI off. If you really want to be on each end of the extreme and you don’t want to tune it, we took the time to kind of like make those two bespoke experiences for people on the end. And we have seen a decent uptake on the No AI side. Just thinking about, you know, closing out a little bit, like, is there anything on the product side or going forward, you know, in addition to all that you want to talk about from like a research perspective or anything.

Zac: Yeah, I could talk for hours. I don’t know if the podcast can sustain that but yeah, it’s just something that you just said was interesting because I did run into my neighbor yesterday who is kind of aware that I work at DuckDuckGo and was asking me about the AI, you know, just in general, not ours, just in general, what’s going on with AI and they were really delighted to hear about noai.duckduckgo.com and I directed them to our search overviews and let them know how you can tune kind of the frequency that those appear in search. And she was like really taken aback by that. I think that’s the kind of experience that we’re trying to manufacture more of is that like the need clearly matches the product that we’re providing. And that connection happens almost instantly where people recognize that that’s what they’ve been looking for. So for us, I think that’s a lot of trust and control and really turning that into what you would call like a delightful UX to getting back to, I think, the podcast as well. So not really AI that confuses you, AI that should be there when it’s truly helpful and how and where that gets embedded into the product is a lot of what our research is focused on going forward. So you’re going to be seeing a lot of how we integrate and make AI easy to get to, easy to get out of, and easy to switch from when you’re navigating between, say, traditional search, browsing, AI. If your phone is in your pocket, your laptop is in your bag, and all of those contexts where a technology can be helpful, but you may not know exactly which one can be. So we want it to be present when it is helpful and kind of hidden or tucked away when you would like to invoke it, but otherwise out of the way.

Gabriel: Cool, that’s a good place to end. Well, thank you, Zac, for coming on.

Zac: Thanks for having me. This was great. Thank you. Bye.

Gabriel: Cool, thanks everybody for listening. See you next time. Bye.

In this episode, Gabriel (Founder) and Caine (CTO, first employee) discuss the history of our search engine, why now is the right time to build a full web search index, and how our scale makes us uniquely positioned to ship, learn and iterate quickly.

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, welcome back to Duck Tales. I haven’t been here in a while. And I am Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo. And I have with me someone who I don’t think has been on Duck Tales at all yet, but you should know, Caine Tighe, who I know very well, who’s the first employee of DuckDuckGo and now our CTO. Caine.

Caine: Hi Gabe.

Gabriel: We’ve been working together for a very long time. And we’re here today to talk about something we’ve both been working on. Caine more than me, but I’m working on it some, which is our web search index. So as some background, first some background. DuckDuckGo started as a search engine, as many people know, and it was actually started by me. I was by myself for a few years. And the first thing I did was start crawling the web and building a web index.

Caine: Yeah, for sure.

Gabriel: But you know, I soon realized that that is very expensive, especially as one person. And there were other places to get a web index at the time. And what was more interesting was maybe adding value on top of the web index. So building other indexes, this was a time, this is the mid 2000s, you know, there weren’t, there obviously wasn’t AI, but there wasn’t even really many instant answers on search engines.

Caine: I mean, that’s what we were working on together at the very, very beginning. Like we were working on, you know, you had the knowledge graph. It wasn’t called a knowledge graph at a time, but you were doing all the structured content from Wikipedia and otherwise. We worked on some other smaller indices. So yeah. And then actually fun fact, in hiring our backend project is still based on some of the original spam and content farm crawling, like one of the projects is based on some of the spam and content farm crawlers that you originally wrote. So that lives on 15 years.

Gabriel: Yeah. So we were doing lots of indexing and lots of crawling. Yeah, exactly. Just not, you know, we started, but then we stopped doing a full web index, but just as examples, right? We started like the code that you were talking about indexing Wikipedia, which became our knowledge graph, you know, which is, powers a lot of answers, which also we used when we started working on AI answers. We’ve been doing local indexing for, you know, over a decade, local businesses and things like that. You know, then all sorts of kind of niche indexes that involve some crawling like lyrics and things like that. So indexing technology is not new to us, despite what some people say about it. Sometimes we do lots of search indexing, but we hadn’t been doing a full web index until relatively recently, last few years-ish. But now we are. And so the question is, the questions and why you’re here, and we’ll talk about it for a few minutes, is kind of why, what’s going on, how, all the main questions, which we’re obviously not all gonna answer today, but we can start with, I think, kind of the why, but why are we well positioned to work on this? So to speak, and you’re kind of at the center of it, so I think you’re a good person to ask.

Caine: Yeah. I mean, I think, the why now is a mixture of like our needs. Like we want to support our own AI use cases. That’s we have two primary agent, agent driven products out. Search Assist, which is on the SERP, search engine results page, duckduckgo.com. And then we have Duck AI, which is our chatbot. And both of those products are hungry for this kind of data. So it, yeah, it just makes sense for that.

Gabriel: Yeah, in particular, right. You could maybe talk percentages, but like there’s some percentage of search results now, what is it like 25%, I think that have Search Assist answers. And then, you know, the percentage better made for Duck AI, but some significant percent call the web, 15% maybe.

Caine: Yeah, I always do. I do, I have my numbers based on, absolutes make more sense. Yeah, yeah, just, yeah.

Gabriel: You know what? Bad question. Ignore numbers. Doesn’t matter. Good percentage of queries and Duck AI prompts require web search. And so we need a web index for it, essentially, right?

Caine: Yeah. I mean, I think on the chatbot side, it’s really good, like to ground. If you’re deciding whether or not to ground and you’re on the line, you should probably use RAG, retrieval augmented grounding, and go out to a third party data set. For us, raising the standard of trust online. We want to do that because the more that you ground, it’s known empirically, the answers are better. So we err on the side of grounding where I think maybe not everybody does. So it’s really good that we need to build our own index in order to be able to accommodate that. So that’s kind of some of the why now. And again, it’s on Search Assist and it’s on Duck AI. One of my favorite parts about this whole thing is like, we’re very used to working for customers, like our end user. For the search index, duckduckgo.com itself is the customer. A very nuanced, unique thing for us to be able to serve ourselves, which creates this really tight feedback loop internally. So it’s been cool to like use our own and we are live for, you know, some amount of the traffic today. That’s just growing day over day for these use cases.

Gabriel: That’s a good point because like, I think in terms of like our position, well, positioned to do it is, you know, being live, you know, maybe we talk about that a little bit, but like that creates a feedback loop that we have that a lot of people don’t have because we have, you know, many, many millions of people using our search engine and now Duck AI. And so we’re getting constant feedback about the relevancy of the search results that we’re serving, not to mention the fact that we have almost 20 years of evaluating relevancy ourself on our own search engine.

Caine: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So like, humans are unsurprisingly and appropriately more, more critical of results than agents are. So it kind of creates this higher fidelity feedback loop because, you know, through our, through anonymization and whatever else, like we can privately understand what is most relevant on the internet for customers and users. And that really helps us to, positions us to be pretty competitive in the space quickly. So like, I think that’s kind of interesting and it’s exciting and like the true DuckDuckGo way as you and I know well, like we like to ship stuff. And so it’s been really cool to, yeah, like it’s just been really cool to be using it already and in production, our own index. And it creates that flywheel and we could, you know, use buzzwords like reinforcement learning and this, that, and the other thing. But at the end of the day, it’s just really the relationship of consuming your own internal API product. That’s the flywheel and allows you to like establish relative priority really quickly and be like, I ran this experiment. Like we really think this query set is going to be well suited to our own index. And then we tried and we’re like, we’re not working that well on that. Let’s move to this other one. And then it just changes the game for how quickly you can iterate, which has been really exciting for, and I know the team’s really excited about it too, because engineers like to ship things. So that’s been cool.

Gabriel: Perfect, I think that’s a good intro. But let’s do, to your point about buzzwords, let’s do a few more buzzwords in terms of like, just give us the broad tech flow, like, you know, without getting too deep into anything, but just to give people a sense of kind of how it works and then maybe.

Caine: Yeah, so kind of the way that I think about this is like a little pipe or a train or whatever. You have your frontier that kind of is the web that you’re looking to crawl, like, because you have to pick what your frontier is. Then you crawl that. Crawling, all of these components are extremely complicated by themselves. To crawl, it means like, you need to crawl politely. Some sites want you to crawl, some sites don’t want you to crawl. And so to be a good trustworthy netizen, you have to respect those things. And that’s an important part of crawling. It’s also important to have the bandwidth and the throughput to crawl at the scale that you need to crawl. And so fortunately for us, we’ve had a lot of experience with that, so we have that. The rendering side, you have to, when you fetch content, you have to render, including JavaScript and everything else like that. The only way to get the content is to literally run the whole webpage. Otherwise, like you get no content. So that’s quite an expensive process. So we kind of do a naive approach and then a more complicated rendered approach. Then you have content extraction, which is like the next step, where you think about your title, your description, your headings, metadata, main body stuff, where you extract the content, what the page actually means. And then we’re very fortunate in today’s day and age to have semantics. So semantic search is a big part of the pipeline. And what that means is what people are calling embeddings. And you calculate embeddings on extracted content. And then we use a database, which I quite like, called Vespa. And it’s all ingested into Vespa. In my opinion, kind of your indexing, your ingestion, your features, how you calculate those things, and how they describe, that’s a big description of your product. Because it limits what you can do in the ranking phases, which we could get into. I don’t know if you want to get into the ranking funnel as well or just the data pipeline.

Gabriel: I think that’s a pretty good overview. I mean, I think, we’ll do more of these in the future, but like, if people have questions, they can write me or write us, but we need to get an email going where people, we have the proper feedback for this podcast.

Caine: A mini series as it were. Yeah, because I’d like to bring in, you know, I can give you the overview, but there’s a lot of experts on the team that, yeah.

Gabriel: Yeah, so I think what we plan in general to come back and we can talk deeper about specific things in the future, but I think that was a great overview. I think we hit it. Anything that we missed that you want to cover or we’re good?

Caine: No, I mean, I think the space is quite interesting and it’s been really fun. Like when we started out, you know, I started out with you 15 years ago and like, we were doing something different back then. The concept of a customer being an AI agent was not really a thing. And I think AI agents as search customers is quite interesting because like, they generate the queries. AI agents are generating the queries. They’re there. The queries are formulated quite well. They don’t feature misspellings. AI agents can consume large amounts of information quickly. Like lots and lots of information. They can speak in embeddings. So I just think it’s a really exciting time. And I think we made the right call to kind of forgo it until more recently. Because now we’re quite well equipped to support ourselves. And we have the products out that really express the needs and the requirements of an API like this. So I know I’m very excited for that, and the team’s very excited for that. So yeah, we should do more of these and get deeper into what a polite crawler really means, as opposed to just glossing over it, because it’s important.

Gabriel: Cool, well, thank you, Caine, for joining, of course. We’ll do more again later. If anyone’s got questions, email them in to us. Otherwise, see you till next time. Bye, everybody.

Caine: Later. Thanks.

This episode, Mary (Associate VP, Brand) Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Bobby (Director, Product) discuss how DuckDuckGo’s browser onboarding was designed, why it matters for a privacy browser, and how Dax’s personality helps users feel confident in their protections.

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.

Mary: Hi everyone and welcome to Duck Tales where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss stories, technology and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering and our approach to AI. I’m Mary McGee, I work on brand and marketing here at DuckDuckGo and I have two fellow product folks here with me today that I will let introduce themselves. Beah, why don’t you start?

Beah: I’m Beah, I’m on the product team. How was that?

Mary: I mean, I couldn’t have done that. You did great. Bobby.

Bobby: This is stuff. I’m Bobby. I’m also on the product team.

Mary: Wow, this was good.

Beah: And furthermore, we both have the word burger in our last names.

Mary: That’s true.

Bobby: This is true.

Mary: We are here to talk about browser onboarding today. And we have both Beah and Bobby here as folks that have worked on onboarding over the years. We can take you back to its origin. We can take you to some of the new changes. That’s kind of what we’re gonna do here and talk a little bit more about it. So why don’t we jump right in? I think, you know, why don’t I ask this to you Beah? Why don’t we start with you? What do we mean by browser onboarding? Like what is effective onboarding and why do you think it’s important for a privacy browser to nail this?

Beah: Yeah, so I think of onboarding as like, basically, the user’s first experience getting to know the app, what is this, how do I use it, and potentially beyond that first experience, could onboarding could last over multiple uses of the app or multiple days. But like the thing that you need to do to get a user from interested, sure, I’ll download it to like, I know how to use this. I know what this is. I know what the value is to me. I know that I want to keep using it ideally. And it’s really important, I think, for probably any app because many, I think for most app categories, the majority of users become non-users after one initial trial of the app, if not the majority, certainly a lot. And so that is a very important moment to show users what you are and what value you can bring to them. And to your question about for a privacy app or privacy browser, I think one of the challenges is that our apps are browsers with a built-in search engine, and all of that should just work. And the privacy protections that we’re providing, for the most part, aren’t really visible for intentional and just organic reasons, like we don’t want to get in your way, and like when, like the absence of bad things is just kind of invisible. So like, you know, I think it’s important for us in particular to like communicate in onboarding what actually is happening when you use the app.

Mary: So there’s like an explanation component of like how to use the app. And then there’s sort of a first impression, like this is who we are, this is how you should feel using it. Bobby, like can you talk a little bit about the role of the more like emotive kind of relationship in onboarding?

Bobby: Yeah, ultimately, there are, I think, stages to actually understanding and feeling connected with an app. And the first one is just knowing what it does. But there are stages beyond that which are feeling connected with what it does and really feeling like you understand it through experience, not just in theory. And so we try to reveal both through the tone with which we describe things and just really emphasizing demonstration and nudging you to try our features and see them and experiencing them for the first time and let you draw your own conclusions about whether that serves you.

Mary: There’s this line in our current onboarding that’s like, it’s something about a tracker losing its wings. Beah, has that been in there since the beginning or is that like...

Beah: Well, yeah, since I’ve been working on onboarding, which is like seven years maybe now, it was one of the first big projects that I worked on after I joined DuckDuckGo. Yeah, I think that, I mean, that copy was part of the, I think every time you browse with me, a creepy ad loses its wings. I think that copy came out of the very first version that we pushed live. And yeah, I don’t know. I think it actually hits with people. I mean, maybe, probably not all people, but just all things. I just remember, first of all, the early versions of that onboarding, some of the copy was super silly. I was hand sketching things and just saying whatever I wanted. And then our copy team had a little conversation with me and was like, hmm, maybe we can dial it down a smidge and I was like okay yeah maybe.

Mary: It’s, yeah, but it’s a good example of what Bobby you’re mentioning and Beah, your point. Like, it’s like, how do you talk about what the product does, but do it in a way that develops that sort of emotional connection. And it’s a funny testament that it stayed around this long. Since you, go ahead.

Beah: I was gonna say, I remember like user testing in like doing video user testing sessions with some of the early prototypes, which were like messy and weird and like hearing participants like laugh out loud, like chortle, say like wow and shriek or like, get mad. Like just have like an emotional reaction that like I definitely had not seen in user testing other components of the app. And I remember being like, I was still relatively new to DuckDuckGo. And I was like, this feels like it’s like doing something different, but maybe I’m just like, want it to feel like that. And I remember sending the videos to our like, kind of head of user insights and being like, am I wrong? Or is this like, are people like really having a reaction? And he was like, no, that’s yeah, they’re spitting their water out. Like, yeah, that’s interesting.

Mary: A chortle. Haven’t heard one of those in many, many years. I mean, since you mentioned it, Beah, like what was onboarding before? So we were talking about onboarding as this like personality, emotive. We can get into who Dax is as we talk about this, but I’m curious, like when you started, when you were doing these explorations and these videos, like what did we have and what were you, what sort of made you start doing this? Like why did you start the exploration that you did?

Beah: Yeah, it’s funny because we had these, I think the onboarding that we replaced was these tooltips that popped up as you moved around the app that were like, this is the fire button, it burns things, this is where you type, I don’t know. And I realized in retrospect after we launched this that on paper it was not that different. We went from tooltips explaining some of the features of the app to what we call Dax dialogues, our mascot Dax telling you things, but there were just a lot of details, I think, that made it feel very different. You could almost imagine the same onboarding coming out of the same written spec, like both, sorry, both very different onboardings coming out of the same written spec, but in practice and application, they felt very different.

Mary: Hmm, that makes sense. Do you have, I know you have maybe some images to share at some point, but yeah, we can always throw these in in post. But I want to, if there’s, yeah, if you want to share, we can always take a look.

Beah: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can share things. I don’t know. Wait, okay, I think I can share things. Oh boy, I gotta do settings. You talk amongst yourselves.

Mary: In the meantime, Bobby, I’m curious, like you came into onboarding. So Bobby came in and was sort of tasked. It was maybe your first project of how can we improve this thing that is working really well, which is not the easiest task. I’m curious, like, what was your first impression? What did you think was working? Where did you want to focus your time?

Bobby: Yeah, I think, well, we’ve been talking about the feeling that we were trying to evoke from people. And one thing that immediately was already working in the version that Beah had previously done is helping you feel confident in the app about how to protect your privacy. And I think that’s a pretty high bar. That’s kind of a challenging thing. Privacy protections can be this vague, intimidating concept, but the tone and particularly using Dax’s voice to deliver these messages was not only unique to really any browser that I had seen, but certainly unique for a pretty serious topic and something that is somewhat technical to understand. So the first thing that stood out to me was that lighthearted approach and the lighthearted language while still being very clear that you can be confident that your protections are active and working for you. And then I guess the second thing I mentioned a little bit earlier, which is just really focusing on demonstrating and helping you experience things. The aha moment for me, and I think a lot of the user tests that we observed was when you see the trackers that are being blocked on the first page you visit and it names the companies. You can find that on any page in DuckDuckGo just by clicking on the shield in the address bar, but to reveal it and the first time you visit any page with trackers that are blocked, you see that list right at the top of the screen. And I think that is really illuminating and eye-opening to understand that it’s actually working and that these trackers might be even more prevalent than you think. And they’re probably popping up on nearly every site you visit, which I think is a good, both a helpful way to understand privacy protection in general and maybe a shift toward privacy browsers are actually good everyday browsers.

Mary: And what were you trying to improve? Obviously you felt like that connection, that demonstration component was there. What were you hoping as you started watching these user testing videos? What did you want to change?

Bobby: Yeah, there were a few things. I mean, we wanted to build on that really, build on using those tools, using the tone and using the demonstration mechanisms to one, highlight more features. So search wasn’t actually highlighted at all during the onboarding flow and we know users love our search. And so we wanted to help people experience that for the first time, notice that it has fewer ads than other search options. Second, we wanted to increase the trial of those features that we were highlighting. So there, that is a drop off, a potential drop off moment where people are like, I downloaded this, but I don’t actually have anything to do with it immediately. I didn’t come because I have one search in mind or one page I’m trying to visit. So they open it. They’re like, okay, I kind of get it. And then they close it and maybe forget about it. How can we actually help you just get through that flow, see how the features work the first time. And then also adding some concrete benefits when we’re asking you to set it up a little bit. So I can elaborate on this a little bit, but we really wanted to introduce the concept of this is a browser. You can directly compare it to your existing browser, Chrome or Safari, wherever you’re coming from. Almost everyone is starting with an existing browser. And so we want it to be familiar, but differentiated. And when we ask you to set those things up, how can we help you set it up as very familiar to what you’re already used to?

Mary: It’s such a good point because we’ve even found, you know, like we get social comments, we get feedback from users. There’s just a lot of skepticism that it can work just as well because, you know, people have been told that you have to sacrifice your privacy for convenience, you know, for the tool, you know, the bookmarking, the sites to work as you want. And so there’s just a lot of built-in, well, it can’t work, it can’t work the same. I can’t use it the same. And so what you’re talking about is like that direct comparison. It really, it seems like it really addresses that straight on. So I’m not surprised that that was effective. Beah, do you have anything to take us back?

Beah: Yeah, yeah. You were talking about the like, aha moment of seeing that we block trackers. Let me show you guys the, maybe, probably the first, this is like just a prototype in Figma, a design tool that we made. So that moment here, and by we made, I think I mean I made it, the design finesse is really something. So yes, this is the first version of that, Uncreepify it. Those arrows were just like, I don’t know, I need people to look at this URL bar somehow.

Mary: Oh my God, look at the old Dax. Look at his skinny beak.

Beah: Privacy grade. Yeah, yeah.

Mary: Wow. That’s pretty good.

Bobby: I’m sad I never got to experience the bent beak. It was already smoothed out and straightened out by the time I got here.

Mary: Indeed, indeed. That’s really cool to see because even though obviously, you know, we don’t have the privacy grade anymore, Dax looks different. The structure of this has really maintained, which was just pretty cool to see.

Beah: Yeah, I remember by the way to the point about like people have to understand this is a replacement browser and that it is in fact like good enough to... I remember one user testing fella who was like, you’d be a fool not to use this. That was like his takeaway. I think he used those words like, and I was just like, yes, like that is like, right, right? Why wouldn’t you want your browser to block this stuff? But yeah, it’s like he had to like get a certain amount of engagement with that, with what we’re trying to do in onboarding to really process and appreciate that and believe it.

Mary: That makes sense. I mean, to your point from the beginning, Beah, it’s like much of the product benefits of DuckDuckGo are the absence of things. It’s like the absence of ads or trackers or cookie pop-ups. That’s actually really hard to communicate because you’re not usually switching and using both and noticing that difference. Is there anything that either of you remember working on this that was like particularly tricky to figure out how to explain or make emotive or find a way to communicate from that perspective?

Bobby: I actually think one of the trickiest things, this isn’t related to those privacy protections, but one of the trickiest things is helping people understand how a browser fits with their OS basically and how to reconfigure their settings. Basically, one of the first things we ask you to do in our app is leave our app and go change your OS settings. That’s a tricky thing to explain that we want you to leave, but we also want you to come right back so that you can understand everything else. That’s a tricky moment. But I think more broadly in terms of privacy, we tried to introduce some consistency to help you feel that your privacy protections are active at all times. And so we use language like protections activated is on the second screen. And then we now have consistent usage of the screen shield that shows up in the address bar on our app, on our search results page, in our Duck AI products, all of which is supposed to just remind you and reassure you and help you feel confident that the protections are actually working for you. And we try to just show you one time what happens if you click on that. It shows you the details of what exactly is happening, what is being blocked, what is being prevented. And I’m reasonably confident that just that one use or an occasional tapping on those details helps you recognize that every time you see this green shield from now forward, behind there are those details, but you don’t need to worry about them most of the time. So highlighting that I think can be a really effective way to minimize distractions in your everyday usage, but introduce it with a reinforcing mechanism as you do.

Mary: How do you think about the cost of onboarding? Like, you know, someone has downloaded this app. I know you said, Bobby, that people won’t always have one search they have in mind, but they’ve downloaded it to probably do something. And we’re, you know, when you create an onboarding experience, you’re saying, before you can do that thing, you have to do this. Like, how do you think of that trade-off of like the user intent versus like what we want them to know and appreciate about the product that they’ve downloaded? For either of you.

Beah: Yeah, I mean, we struggle with this quite a bit and like, and there we get feedback that people don’t want to go through onboarding and we’re sympathetic like, you know, most internal employees who work on the app have gone through onboarding approximately 7,583,000 times like, I get it. And in fact, we’ve experimented with giving people a big skip option. And even when it’s just an option, and we don’t make it super, try not to make it super tempting, but try to let people really self-select in. It has actually harmed retention as we’ve been able to measure it, which is sometimes a tough metric to move. So yeah, it’s tricky. We try really hard to just, I think, pick the content that is most relevant and also make it easy to dismiss and get out of the way if you’re halfway through and you’re done and not having it. And Bobby’s done a lot of work on that, like just making it more dismissible.

Bobby: Yeah, we, I mean, we do, every screen is dismissible. So if you’re just not, if you’re trying to get to something right now, you can just click the X at every point and do whatever you’re trying to get done. And then we’ll still introduce some contextual nudges and tips as your path unfolds. But one other thing to mention about the efficiency versus like the efficiency of getting through onboarding versus helping people really understand and learn the benefits. That is in user testing, the most common challenge in really understanding are people getting through this or are they just annoyed by it? I really believe that Dax’s tone gives us a little bit of leeway and offsets some of the frustration because you can literally, as Beah mentioned, you can hear people laughing and smiling as they go through something. I think that automatically offsets a little bit of the, am I doing this? Because at least you’re not having like being forced through what feels like a lecture, hopefully. That’s what we aspire to. I know some people still do feel that and they still feel like even in that tone, or especially in that tone, it’s kind of annoying. But ultimately, I think more user testers feel really good and smile and recognize that they’re having a little bit of fun on their day also.

Mary: Who could get mad at the duck? Come on. So cute. Yeah, terrible. All right. Before I wrap up, is there anything either of you want to say about onboarding that I didn’t ask you or anything you want to call out?

Beah: Maybe just riffing off of what Bobby was just saying, I think when we originally worked on this format, the thing in my mind was really a video game. I’m not a gamer, so I don’t know what the language is for the video games where you’re exploring a world and you get the dialogues. I think I’d been recently introduced to Animal Crossing, probably COVID times. So maybe there’s some inspiration in that.

Bobby: I’ll just say one more thing, which is that we’re doing even more. We’re still working on onboarding. We’re always trying to improve it. So we’ve got some new and exciting stuff coming soon that I think will make it even more illuminating and hopefully a bit more fun.

Mary: Yeah, and I can attest that Bobby reads all user feedback related to onboarding. So if you have some, please share. I can guarantee it’ll be read right over there. All right, closing rapid fire questions. I’ll ask you both just to. Beah, how long have you been at DuckDuckGo and why do you work here?

Beah: About seven years, or maybe coming up on eight, so a while. Why I work here, because I get to hang out with people like you and talk about fun things like duck onboarding.

Mary: Love it. Bobby, same question.

Bobby: I’ve been here a little over two years and I guess I work here because I used the product for a very long time and I liked contributing to something that I value. Particularly like I came probably for the unpersonalized results and I stick around to help more people discover them and improve them.

Mary: Hmm. Okay, that answer didn’t involve me at all, but fine. Yeah, yeah, I preferred Beah’s answer.

Beah: I felt upstaged like Bobby was like taking the high moral ground. I’m like, okay, it’s just rapid fire Bobby like, but cool.

Bobby: I was anticipating another question, but maybe not which is where I was gonna mention you, Mary, but personally, by name and how much I love working with you.

Mary: Nope. Nope. No, we’re cut for time. Cut for time.

Bobby: Alright, fine.

Beah: I work here because I like seeing Bobby dress up in Dax costumes.

Mary: Yeah, famous for it, always. Yeah.

Bobby: That’s a good one. Well, something that surprises me about working here is that not only are people very smart, but they’re also very funny. You two are very funny and there may be some other very funny employees, which keeps every day entertaining.

Beah: Thanks, Bobby.

Mary: Yeah. It’s actually, I said something similar, when I answered this question. So that’s interesting. All right. Thank you both. Thanks, everyone for watching. See you next time.

Bobby: Thank you.

In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and John (People Ops) discuss aynchronous working, no meeting days, and the role of face to face meetups.

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.

Beah: Hello, and welcome to DuckTales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. This is my dog, Friday. He’s appeared in other episodes. So in each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or our approach to AI.

John: Hello.

Beah: In this episode, you will be hearing about our approach to remote work. I’ll quickly introduce myself. I’m Beah. I am on the product team at DuckDuckGo. Then, John, I’ll let you introduce yourself.

John: Thanks, Beah. Yeah, my name’s John. I work on the People Ops team at DuckDuckGo. You can probably hear from my accent. I’m one of the couple of members of the team that’s based in the UK. So my job is predominantly around meetups and a little bit about culture, but predominantly about meetups and how we meet up in person and a little bit virtually as well. So yeah, that’s my role here.

Beah: Great. Yeah, so that is a good segue to jumping right into talking about how we work remotely and how we connect personally given the remote circumstance. So maybe just before we get too deep into the details and what we actually do, can you describe, John, just like what we even mean when we say that we’re a remote company?

John: Yeah. So in very simplistic terms, I would see being a remote company as us not all going to one central place to work. You know, we don’t have a big office building that we all come into either on a semi-regular or, you know, an everyday basis. So that is people probably predominantly working from home, but not necessarily. We have ways and means at DuckDuckGo for people to work, you know, in a co-working space with other people if they need that or if they have circumstances at home where they need to. Essentially, there’s a choice and a trust in where people work. We feel, you know, there’s pros and cons to that, but we feel there’s a, you know, overall a net positive, I think, to that way of working. So that’s the way I would think about it, that we work in that way. And then to facilitate that happening, you know, all companies will have tools to, you know, online digital tools to allow people to collaborate and move their work forward. But we maybe think a bit more or maybe have a few more tools that allow us to collaborate digitally and make sure that we do what we need to do online essentially and digitally.

Beah: Do you know, you might not, but do you know how many people do work from co-working spaces or somewhere social that is not their home?

John: Yeah, not too many in the company. So we offer a financial element for everybody if they want to work in a co-working space. I think we definitely have a handful of people, certainly in our organization, who pretty permanently work in co-working spaces. And that may range from family circumstances or living circumstances, whether it’s just difficult to work from home, through to people that just need that kind of social interaction each day. And that’s what makes them more productive. I think there’s a handful that work fairly permanently from coworking spaces. And then there’s definitely a good chunk of the organization that will treat themselves for a day in a coworking space, maybe once a month or meet up with somebody to work with. But yeah, I’d say that most of our team day to day will work from home, really, have a set up at home. Yeah.

Beah: Yeah. And I guess, I mean, we have, maybe I’m getting ahead of the conversation, but we also have plenty of locations where there’s like clusters of DuckDuckGo people, like a dozen people or five people or just three people, and they will sometimes get together, either like work together or just like grab dinner, grab lunch, right?

John: Yeah. And that’s happening more and more as we, you know, as we get bigger. You know, I had a quick look at our stats before we started this conversation, you know, 10 years ago, we were around 30 people. So, you know, meeting up was much harder. Now, you know, 10 times that amount. You know, for example, I know there’s a meetup happening in Spain. I can’t remember if it’s Barcelona or Madrid, but there’s a meetup happening soon just because we’ve had a lot of new starters start in that region. So somebody thought, well, that would be nice. We can get to our different types of meetups and how we arrange that. But that’s really cool. We’ve had a few people start in Spain and someone’s thought it’d be really nice to meet up in person. So yeah, whether that’s sometimes dinner or just a co-working day, we’re becoming more and more common.

Beah: Okay. I actually am in the midst of planning a family vacation to London and we have a ton of folks there and I am gonna try to plan a meal and see as many people as are willing to come meet me for a meal.

John: Yeah. You see, that’s nice. That says something that you don’t want to have for your holiday and completely not see anybody from work. That’s kind of nice. There will be some people who don’t want to do that. But yeah, that’s really cool. That’s really nice. Yeah, we’ve got a lot of folks in London.

Beah: Yeah. Yeah, I actually like that. It’ll be cool for my family members to meet folks too, because they, especially as we’ve gotten bigger, they know fewer and fewer of the people that I spend my day with, and so I’m excited.

John: Yeah, yeah that’s nice, that’s really cool.

Beah: Okay, all right, I kind of got us a little off track there, but I think that’s okay. So tell me a little bit about like, you know, given that we’re just everywhere in the world, how do we do meetings generally? What kinds of meetings? How do we talk live to each other?

John: Yep, no, don’t worry. Yeah, I mean, taking a step before how we do meetings, I would say we make an effort in some ways not to do meetings if we can, let that go. So another way of thinking of working remotely or as we, it’s a bit of a pretentious term, asynchronous working or async working. I know when I said that to my family, they were like, what? I was like, essentially we work online, but we write a lot of stuff down. That’s the way I would think of async working. We maybe write more stuff down than a lot of other companies would. So I would say we don’t try and avoid meetings for the sake of it. But I would say that if we can, we try to do things async if we can. And even if we do have meetings at DuckDuckGo, we try and do as much prep before that to save as much time in those meetings as well. And I know I found it slightly disconcerting, but also amazing when I joined DuckDuckGo that sometimes we had a meeting in the diary for half an hour and in previous organizations, half an hour wouldn’t have been enough to cover it. But not only that at DuckDuckGo, we finish the meeting sometimes in like nine minutes because there’s been a lot of chat before the meeting and you sometimes feel like, well, this feels a bit too easy, but it’s because that work has been done already and the meeting is just a really important thing for us to align and if there is anything else. You know, we, other people have maybe talked about this on this, we, Wednesdays and Thursdays are non-meeting days for us in terms of standing meetings. You know, we try and keep those, well, we do keep those for deep work. We don’t make exceptions to that rule. So we do use Zoom, you know, for, and we have, and I really like this, we have a number of processes, I guess, whether that’s kicking off a project or post, what we call post-morteming a project where we, I would go so far as to say we mandate, don’t we, getting together in person, we think getting together on Zoom is important to do those meetings. And we don’t make exceptions to that. And that’s what I mean by having sometimes a very quick meeting, we decide what processes require a meeting. So yeah, most of them done through Zoom. I think it’s very rare at DuckDuckGo to have really more than a half hour meeting, isn’t it? For most project kickoffs and post-mortems team meetings, maybe a little bit longer, but even then we pack quite a lot in. So yeah, most of our meetings are done online and we try and keep them as minimal as possible and as useful as possible. Yeah.

Beah: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the way I think about it is like, we, I feel like we try to, you know, reason from first principles about when a meeting is the right venue for something rather than defaulting to meeting. And so there are times when that is absolutely critical. Then there, and there’s times when it’s actually like not the best way to make a decision or come to some conclusion or a hybrid is the best model, like you said, of thinking it through, writing it down ahead of the meeting, meeting to pull out the nuances, do the things that happen really well live. And then also we try to like, you know, we kind of have a principle of like a decision isn’t really made in a meeting. Like a decision can kind of be discovered and cultivated and then we kind of like write it down because there are times when you’re like, you’re caught up in the moment of the meeting and maybe the social dynamics or I don’t know, you’re just, you’re thinking on the spot and then afterwards, you know, in a moment of reflection or writing like, you think, well, maybe that’s actually not the logical answer.

John: Absolutely, yeah. And I think another thing I found about meetings at DuckDuckGo, you know, I’ve been here about three years and this is no slight to any other organization I’ve been at, but it also feels slightly disconcerting not giving really any status updates at meetings. Like we tend to dive straight in because we assume that everyone attending that meeting is aware of the things we’re going to be discussing at that meeting and is relatively prepped for it. We know everybody’s busy, but relatively prepped for it. And as you say, it’s almost like converging on a decision and that can feel slightly strange compared to other organisations where you are sometimes in meetings spending your time getting people up to speed. I don’t think we do that a lot at DuckDuckGo. We tend to all enter a meeting pretty much knowing why we’re there, what our role is in that meeting, why we’re there to discuss what we’re discussing, you know. So that feels great as well. When we do have a meeting, it feels purposeful in that way. Yeah.

Beah: Yeah, I mean, okay, so maybe in contrast to the somewhat throwing shade on like spending too much time in a meeting, there is value in all being together, you know, via Zoom and in person. Let’s talk a little bit about the in person part or a little bit more because we kind of touched on it. But what do we do in terms of getting people together?

John: Yeah. So we, this again, when you are a company that is evolving and growing at the, you know, there’s companies that, you know, will grow people wise a lot quicker than us, I get that. But when you, when you do sort of grow tenfold, that can be, feel quite dynamic in terms of how we do it. So that is still constantly changing and we’re working out what works best for us. As a principle, everybody will meet up in person at DuckDuckGo generally twice a year as a minimum-ish. So our functional teams all have an opportunity to meet up once a year somewhere in the world and they will get together. And then we have an all company get together. Yeah, good point. So we work across objectives. So

Beah: What do you mean when you say functional teams?

John: I know other people have discussed this in this podcast series before, but we work across objectives rather than always in those functional teams, but we do have a home. So we have, for example, a design team, a certain engineering team. You’re in the product team, I’m in the people ops team. So we will have functional meetups once a year with those teams, me and my, there’s nine of us in the people ops team. So we will get together once a year. And then we have an all company meetup, which is again, once a year, we hold them at a cadence where they’re roughly six months apart. So everybody can sort of see somebody, see people in real life every six months at least. So they’re the two main ones that we do. We do co-working meetups as well, which is a lot of fun. So anybody can suggest a co-working meetup. We don’t cover absolutely everything for that, but we give people the opportunity to book office space and hotels, et cetera, to meet up as a co-working meetup.

Beah: Okay.

John: And then aside from that, and this is another thing I really like about DuckDuckGo, we have a high level of trust to then allow people to meet up really in any way they feel is beneficial. And we have checks and balances on that, but most of our objective work is done online and is done not in person, but every now and again, an objective will want to meet up. Somebody will feel it’s important for the, let’s be really honest, every company there will be certain objectives that feel straightforward and there are other objectives where actually getting together in person might iron out some problems or might feel the right thing culturally for that objective. So we do have some objectives that choose to meet in person as well, which is, you know, it’s a big ask of people to do that as well. You know, there’ll be two types of people and then everybody in between around whether flying halfway across the world for work seems really exciting and thrilling. And there will be people that always feel that and people that are absolutely like, oh no, whatever they need to, they’re a home bird or they’ve got family or whatever, or travel’s not their thing. So we want to make sure when we do bring people together, it’s really meaningful and it resonates with people.

Beah: Yeah. Yeah, that’s very much on my mind. In the past couple weeks, I’ve been working with the product team to pick a location for our upcoming meetup. And there’s definitely a lot of people who are torn between wanting to go somewhere exciting and new, but also do I actually want to arrive at this thing coming off a red eye with however many hours on a plane versus a more convenient location that’s maybe a little bit less exciting. So tell me a little bit about like how we generally outside of that anecdote pick locations and dates for these in-person events or meetups.

John: Yeah, the dates is relatively simple. We have a, as I say, a cadence of, we try, it’s pretty flexible, but we try and have a six month cadence between those functional meetups and the all company meetup, which just feels a nice balance. So our functional teams, we try and get them together sort of March, April, May time. And then we do our all company meetup roughly six months later. And we do that, you know, September, October, November kind of time, roughly. Sure.

Beah: Can I interject a detail about the timing of the meetups? So we used to just say, basically pick it. Well, several years ago, we were just like, it’s all on you, functional team. Just do what you want to do in terms of dates. Then we kind of said, try to do it in the spring, that sort of April-ish timeline. And then, and now, I think maybe this year or last year for the first time, we’re like, try to do it in one of these three weeks. And the idea there, I think we’re still, it’s like, you can tell me if I’m wrong, but still open to evolving that model. It’s a little bit tricky when you have two months where there’s always one or two teams missing at a time, so consolidating that. But we also don’t want to force teams to pick a single week that might not work for that team, and so trying to find the right balance there.

John: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. What you’ve just said there, I think could be applied to so much stuff at a company like ours that has gone from 30 people to close to 400 people, where you want to keep that magic. You don’t want to become a really processy policy based company. That’s not what we want, but you’re absolutely right. As teams get bigger, we just need a few more guardrails on it and a bit more guidance. That’s what we’ve tried to do over the last couple of years. So you’re absolutely right. With this year, is the first year we picked like three core weeks where we said to teams, if you can go away during those three weeks, brilliant. If you can’t, the main goal is to get people together. So there’s no point going away as a team of 15 people, if only three of you can make one of those weeks, you know, so we will. And that seems to have worked pretty well this year, sorry, there’s one week where we’ve got, you know, close to half of the organization out for a week, which sounds odd, but it means we can kind of shut down for a whole week. And everybody’s aware of that and then start fresh the week after.

Beah: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right, maybe not shut down if half the company’s available. I do, I do, yeah. Yeah, you rip the bandaid off basically. And I should clarify, at these functional team meetups, the agenda, it’s not work as usual. I think everybody’s using their best judgment and if there’s something that is time sensitive, sure, they might be progressing something or unblocking something, but like the majority of the agenda is about like taking advantage of being together in the room and working through things outside of the normal flow of work.

John: No, shut down, clearly. Yeah, but you know what I mean. You can put it into your project planning. Exactly. Yeah. Absolutely, yeah. So it’s not work in its traditional sense. Every team will do what’s right for them, but I think we all work in a similar way, this is how we guide teams to do it. So if I look at my own meetup with my team, we didn’t sit down and do core people-based work, but we did some sessions where we had some special guests and other teams kind of sign in on Zoom while we were all together in the room and we had little chats with other people at DuckDuckGo about AI, for example, and we had someone from the data science team talk to us about evaluation methods, because that’s something we do a lot of. So we will absolutely have some work based chats and we did some personality stuff, which was kind of fun. Yeah, the rest of the time is just hanging out and it’s pretty unstructured hanging out. We do give some guidance on what kind of works well for teams, especially bigger teams. It probably goes without saying with our company, but we’re not, you know, unless the team wants to, we’re not going to a riverbank and building a raft. It’s not, and doing trust falls. It’s not that kind of, that’s not what our meetups are about. We want people to just organically hang out. So, you know, we do do activities. Actually that does sound all right. That does. It’s yeah, but we definitely want the teams to have the choice of what they do essentially and what works well for them. So.

Beah: Going to a riverbank and building a raft sounds great. But okay, that’s just me. That’s just me. Yeah. Yeah.

John: So yeah, so that’s the content on them. And go back to your original question. Sorry, go on, go on.

Beah: And, and no, well, so in terms of like the whole company meetups, I think kind of the same principles apply, right? Like we are, it’s not like, it’s not trust falls unless you really want to do trust falls in which case you can do trust falls. You and I are definitely doing trust falls. I feel like this whole conversation is a trust fall. And it’s not, but it’s also not really like decision-making work, right? I mean, I’m thinking now about the whole company meetup. We’re not coming together in the annual, it’s not like an annual meeting of business where we’re trying to resolve things. I mean, you talked about just relationship building is a big part of it, getting to know each other. And then I think, but you tell me how you think of it. It’s like the other big component is kind of basically learning, like context building and learning from each other. No, you tell me the correct answer.

John: No. Exactly that. No, exactly that. There’s probably a main aim for it and then some sub aims that we have for it and objectives. The main aim is, our chief exec Gabriel will talk about this when he stands up at the start of the meeting, it’s to hang out. It’s to spend some time together. And if you look at it in business terms or psychology terms, that’s about trust building, that’s about collaboration. But essentially it’s hanging out. It’s getting to know people face to face. And we really evaluate our meetups, but there’s a certain amount of sort of unmeasurable magic that comes with that, that just feels nice about being at those meetups. So yeah, we do some work sessions in the morning. As you say, explore each other’s work that we’re doing. We do some pretty informal sessions, presentations, and a lot of the time when I say presentations, it may be just a couple of slides and then a chat about an objective and people can go and learn about what everybody else is working on.

Beah: Okay.

John: Even those can feel pretty chill. And I can tell we do them in a chill way when I go and speak to the venues. You know, we might book out seven rooms at a venue and we’ll have concurrent sessions going on. And the venues obviously work with companies where they’re very, how many chairs do you need in this room? And what do you want us to do with the empty chairs? And is everybody mic’d up? And do you want us to, and it’s like, it’s just cool. If the mic doesn’t work, we’ll all just have a chat. And if there’s not enough seats, I’ve seen people sitting on the floor and that’s not ideal, but it’s fine. We’ll be all right. We’ll be cool. So even that has a chilled feel. And then, yeah, we spend the rest of the time at our all company meetups doing fun stuff really. And go back to the point of, none of that is mandated. So if you’re somebody that finds it a lot and it is a lot coming away for a week and being with 300 colleagues suddenly, it’s a weird thing. It’s a lovely thing, but it’s a weird thing and it can be tiring. So we don’t mandate anybody doing anything really. We want everybody to come along to the work sessions because that’s a really nice opportunity to hear about what the organization is doing. So that’s as close as we get to mandating something. But in the afternoon, and this is what I love about DuckDuckGo, it’s a lot of self-run things that people at DuckDuckGo are passionate about. So we’ve got a lot of people that are passionate about board games. So I don’t arrange any of that. I literally find a space and someone at DuckDuckGo will set up a board game room. You know, we have a chess tournament, we have art classes, we’ve had writing classes in the past, we do a lot of sporty stuff. You know, people that are passionate about basketball or softball, actually people that aren’t passionate about those will go along and just hang out and have fun at those. So yeah, it’s a very chill environment, a very, and that seems to work. It seems really nice. Yeah.

Beah: Yeah, I love personally that I do all the sporting stuff even though I’m not a very skilled athlete. I would say I’m passionate but not skilled. Like the only time I play basketball, soccer slash football, softball is once a year at the company meetup. But I love it and it’s so cool because like I actually, I didn’t play, this was the first year that I played soccer slash football. And I’ve never in my life been a soccer player. And there’s people at DuckDuckGo who have played borderline professional football in Europe. Like, people who have actually played on teams where people are getting paid to play really well. And then there’s me who did not even play in a kids league in the US. And somehow it is just magical to like see how the teams come together and just the level of camaraderie and respect and everybody kind of meeting each other where they’re at. I was genuinely a little nervous that it was going to be like, that I was going to be, yeah, or that people would kind of feel like it would be annoying to have me on the team. Like, well, maybe it was, but nobody acted like it was. So I had a great time. I had a great time. Yeah.

John: Yeah, super competitive and... I didn’t hear anybody saying that. There wasn’t any, yeah, it’s cool. I think for people, you know, there might be a lot of people listening to this going, how cool does that sound like going away? And there is, I always think my job is one of the most fun jobs in the world. Like I’ve got such a cool job. I get to go out and sort all these fun events. You know, I’m not sorting an Uber like to the minute work event where I’m very stressed about this person coming on stage at the right time. So we’ve not got that, which is lovely for me. And then the stuff I do arrange is things like, yeah, I’ll book a softball field for people. And it’s such a lovely job to be able to do that. But I do always say to people, like, if I was doing that for entitled people, my job would pretty soon be terrible. Like if I had a bunch of entitled people turn up, because, you know, things go wrong at these things, or, you know, people are tired from travel and that’s for me, what is lovely about our meetups. It’s full of people doing lovely stuff for the other people at DuckDuckGo. Like if they’ve got a passion, as I say, like, you know, I’ll get a ping, hey John, I’m really passionate about this role playing game that we do. Could we do it in the meetup? Of course, yeah, that’d be great. So it’s self-organized and you just get happy people doing fun stuff and it’s lovely. Yeah, a bunch of unentitled people just enjoying themselves. It’s nice, yeah.

Beah: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I know now we’re just in the realm of like, we’re so great. Such a lovely group. Tell me like, before we wrap this up, I think this podcast has gone longer than most because I mean, really, what were they thinking when they put the two of us in a room? Were they thinking that it was going to be 12 minutes?

John: It’s so nice. Yeah, it’s so lovely. Yeah, sorry, that’s me. I know and it’s fun to talk about travel rather than, you know, email security or whatever, it’s a lot of fun of course but I’m just saying yeah sorry cool.

Beah: Yeah, it is fun. So tell me though, are there any like, is there like a magical meetup moment that we haven’t already mentioned that you want to cite?

John: I guess I’m so cliché, but I think most of the magical moments are kind of the smaller ones really. You know, from people doing events, like I, I’m normally running around doing stuff, but the year before last, I did get to play like soccer and stuff. So I agree with you. Like that sort of stuff is kind of feels fairly magical for me. It’s like the smaller stuff. So, you know, when I, to sound like a proud parent or something. When I wander through the hallway and you maybe see, I don’t know, our CTO who’s been here since almost day one sitting with a new starter who’s been here a month from marketing and then maybe an engineer in that team and you see them all just having a coffee together. That’s kind of a magical moment because that doesn’t, we do engineer that to happen a bit virtually but they still, I don’t care what anyone says, there’s still that slight cringey, slightly awkward thing about virtual socializing. There is, isn’t there? We remember it like during COVID. Like it was fun and we had to do it and we did Zoom calls with the family and stuff, but it never feels quite as organic as like real life. That for me always makes me smile at the meetups when you see a group of unexpected people together doing things. That feels like a sort of a magical moment. I guess for me as well, I would say like we’ve evolved it the last couple of years, but our welcome session always feels really magical. You know, this year was the first time we did that in the evening. And it was a bit of a celebratory thing. So I know you were on stage sort of talking about product stuff and we had a number of people that felt really cool in terms of a celebratory element of where we’d got to over the year and an update of where we were at. But still a good laugh, you know, and people really, you know, getting involved with it with the vibe of it and stuff. So, yeah, I would say those are the magical moments. I guess if people are like hearing that and going, he sounds a bit corporate saying that. I’ll be really honest, like, we’ve stayed in some like beautiful properties as well, like not necessarily like really posh, but like in beautiful places. So you do, I’m sure the vast majority of people who work here, sometimes when they’re getting a coach in the airport and it sort of takes that last turn and you’ve got like a mountain range, for example, and like this old hotel that you know is all of ours and there’s a lake and it’s like, wow. So that I think for a lot of team members that feels a bit of a pinch me kind of magical moment I think that always feels nice yeah.

Beah: Yeah. Awesome. All right. Well, I think we’ve officially deeply exceeded the time limit. So I think we should wrap John. Yeah. I think so. I think people, I think people would listen to that.

John: Yeah. Okay, let’s do that. We’ll do like a three hour, we can do a three hour version, the two of us. Yeah, like we can do a long form. For our subscribers, that’s what podcasts do, isn’t it? We have a short, okay, as long as we get him or her as an audience. Yeah, that’d be great. Yeah, no. Thanks, Beah. It’s been fun. Yeah, cool. Yeah, you too. Thank you. Cheers.

Beah: My dog would. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you so much. It was nice. Yeah, nice chatting. All right. Later.

Sonnet 4.6

Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.

In this episode, Cristina (CMO) and John (Marketing, previously co-founder of Removaly) discuss the acquisition process, adjusting to DuckDuckGo culture, and how Removaly has informed our customer service and product strategy.

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: Learn more about the DuckDuckGo Subscription, including Personal Information Removal.

Cristina Hi, and welcome to DuckTales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or approach to AI. I’m Cristina on the marketing team, and today we’ll be talking to John about DuckDuckGo’s acquisition of Removaly, where John was a co-founder and is how we were lucky enough to get him on our team. John, would you like to say hi and introduce yourself?

John Yeah, absolutely. I’m John Bourscheid. I’m also on the marketing and communications team. I dabble in basically everything digital marketing, customer support, SEO, and I’m really glad to be here.

Cristina Thank you, John. So in 2022, DuckDuckGo made our first acquisition, Removaly, to accelerate building the DuckDuckGo subscription, which today includes a VPN, personal information removal, identity theft restoration, and advanced AI models. So John, first question is an easy one. What was Removaly? What problem was it solving?

John Yeah, absolutely. Removaly was a small startup in the data removal space. It was geared towards helping users remove their personal information from data brokers and people search sites quickly, effectively, and completely hands off. We automated the removal process. We provided users with real-time dashboards on removal progress, and we scanned daily to ensure that removed personal information stayed offline. Opting out of those sites manually is pretty complex, which is where services like ours came in.

As far as problems, our user base really faced like a full variety of problems from general avoidance of public facing personal details to more proactive removal just for privacy sake to reactive responses from things like doxing, swatting, stalking, you name it, honestly.

Cristina Yeah, those are scary, serious problems. Even for someone who hasn’t faced those problems, but is just on a search for their name, it’s super creepy having all that info show.

John Yeah.

Cristina So what was it like building and scaling Removaly?

John It was awesome. My co-founder Kyle and I, we were the only two employees at Removaly outside of an awesome part-time support specialist we hired towards our final months of operation. So Kyle and I started kind of ideating in late 2019. At the time we both had full-time jobs, so it was more of a side project for us. The business was just bootstrapped by Kyle and I from day one. We put our own money into it and we never raised any investor money at any point.

So we spent 18 months building and testing the product. Kyle handled the full stack of our dashboards and automations, and I built our public facing site and handled the marketing, communications, and growth aspects. We dabbled in each other’s spaces just to kind of test and validate things. And at the time we were the only US-based and self-funded data removal service, as well as the only service that scanned daily. And I think we still were. As far as scaling goes, we focused mostly on content marketing in the interest of both costs and longevity.

We offered free opt-out guides for every site that we covered with our paid service. We did comparison guides between us and competing services, and we offered extensive privacy resources. That content quality really led to extensive organic traffic for relevant search terms, and then active engagement in communities such as IndieHackers, Reddit, and Twitter really helped us grow via word of mouth. But besides the daily scanning, our other main differentiator was support.

While there were only two of us working on Removaly part-time, we offered Live Chat, which was super effective in gaining insights into what our existing and our prospective users were looking for in a service. We took this feedback to heart and we used it to iterate on our own product wherever we possibly could. While it definitely made the scaling aspect super difficult, it really wasn’t impossible, it was just exhausting. And this is honestly one of the main reasons that Kyle and I followed through with getting acquired by DuckDuckGo.

Cristina That does sound exhausting, but kudos for really listening to users and really wanting them.

John Absolutely.

Cristina What were your initial thoughts and what was the acquisition process like?

John The first signal we got was several DuckDuckGo team members signed up for Removaly on the same day, including our founder Gabriel. When DuckDuckGo first reached out to connect with us, we kind of assumed that they were looking at offering our services to their employees as we were actively working on entering the B2B space with Removaly. Whenever they reached out and floated an acquisition, we discussed it a lot.

Everyone we interacted with on the DuckDuckGo team was awesome and the acquisition process went relatively smoothly. It was extensive and thorough for sure. It took about six months from start to finish, but we brought on a guy named Sean Flynn to assist from a mergers and acquisitions perspective as it was totally new territory for both Kyle and I. And he did a great job helping guide us through the process to an amicable conclusion. This is kind of where I dropped the big claim to fame that Kyle and I have of we never met in person until the day we had acquired. In fact, the entire Removaly product was built and for the first year it was run without us even having a phone call. The whole thing was done on Slack.

Cristina That’s incredible. And it reminds me of DuckDuckGo’s founder and first employee meeting online. I guess it meant you were well prepared to work in our fully remote company.

John Yeah, for sure.

Cristina So what was it like joining DuckDuckGo, figuring out our culture, processes, and going from a team of two to 200?

John To be honest, the way things that are configured and structured here made it a breeze. Every aspect of DuckDuckGo is meticulous, it’s thorough, and it’s well documented. So learning the ropes here was super simple compared to prior workplaces I’ve been at, at least in my experience. The culture here is really unlike anything I’ve ever experienced anywhere I’ve ever worked. Having built Removaly entirely on Slack, we got used to documenting everything we did.

This translated super well to DuckDuckGo’s cultural strategy of working in the open, which makes questioning assumptions and validating direction a really natural step in the process.

Cristina Did anything surprise you?

John To be candid, we first assumed that the privacy first aspect of DuckDuckGo was less important than dollars, as is the case with pretty much every other tech company we came across.

After all, how could a company really have such name recognition and growth with so few employees while leaving a bunch of money on the table? But after we digested the company culture and the processes and the principles and how things are run, it was obvious that we were way off in that assumption. I’ve really never seen a company like this where we just truly take privacy seriously, put it at the forefront of everything we do and do so purposefully, even at the detriment of revenue. It’s really impressive and admirable. And I’m really glad to be able to be part of a great crew.

The motto that we don’t track our users is not really just fly by night. It really is how we do things here. And it consistently impresses me even over three years into this.

Cristina I agree. And what can I say except we talk the talk, we walk the walk. As challenging as it can be, it’s a big part of what makes working at DuckDuckGo so special.

John For sure. Yep.

Cristina So how has Removaly informed DuckDuckGo’s personal information removal?

John Yeah, so the initial plan was to deconstruct Removaly completely and then rebuild it with stronger privacy controls and rebuild it on device, which was and still is a major differentiator in this data removal space. For a bit, I was focused on assisting in this endeavor wherever possible using my very, very scattered skill set. The on-device aspect was pivotal to truly ensure users’ privacy, and it took a ton of development and testing to make it a reality.

There was, to me, a lot of awe and admiration that I felt watching Kyle essentially build a business from scratch by hand in 18 months with Removaly. I really got to relive that from a totally different perspective watching several of the most talented developers and designers I’ve ever seen do it all over again on steroids. It was super, super cool to watch.

Cristina So what’s next for personal information removal?

John The data removal space has gotten super turbulent in the past few years to the point where some of our competitors have shut their doors completely. It’s a constant battle with people search sites to effectively and automatically process and submit these opt out requests for people. Despite this, we’ve kept our heads above water. We figured out connections between sites and we’ve been reworking our processes to effectively continue to remove personal information automatically for our subscribers.

The regulatory space for data brokers is also changing constantly. We’ve been working on collaborating with other services and regulatory agencies on the most effective ways to keep this dissemination of personal information at bay. So it’s a constant battle, but we’re in the fight for the long haul.

Cristina Yeah, a never-ending challenge, isn’t it? I love looking at my dashboard and seeing removed, all clear, but I know there’s a lot of work to keep it that way.

John Truly. It sure is. Yeah, there’s a whole factory behind the scenes working on it.

Cristina Well, the last thing I want to touch on is that Removaly was known for customer support. How has that transferred to DuckDuckGo?

John Yeah, okay, so I mentioned our customer support briefly a little bit ago. That was another piece that I really wanted to foster at DuckDuckGo. And to do so, I helped lead the charge to develop our streamlined customer support strategy for this subscription. Then I kind of stepped into a pseudo support specialist role and over time I’ve cleared, I think it’s about 14,000 tickets and user concerns across the subscription space one-on-one while also contributing elsewhere across the company.

The support aspect was really critical to me and my own convictions when it came to running and growing a successful subscription product. And I’ve been a vocal, probably annoying at sometimes, proponent of a customer first focus for the subscription and beyond. This kind of translated really well into a well-rounded support experience that balances both effort and quality. We now have an awesome support team here, and I’m really excited to see how we can continue to grow and adapt as the company continues to increase its visibility globally.

Cristina Yeah, the volume you mentioned is just staggering. And when you co-hosted a customer support session at our meetup, it was really eye-opening for me, both in terms of how tricky it can be sometimes with edge case questions, but also the care you and the team put into helping people and delivering that real human touch.

John Most definitely, yeah. There’s a lot of nuance involved and I treat every one like it’s a puzzle that we’re trying to solve.

Cristina Yeah, indeed. Well, John, thank you so much for sharing your experience about the acquisition. I think it’s a great story. And I’m so thankful for it, not only because of what it did for our personal information removal product, but also because now we have you on the marketing team.

John I’m so happy to be here, honestly.

Cristina Awesome. Well, for those watching, we have many more DuckTale episodes in the works and I plan to be back for some more. So see you then. Bye.

John Thank you, see ya.

In this episode, Mary (Senior Director, Brand), and Nirzar (AI Design Lead) discuss why we developed a new typeface, how we implemented it, and its role in communicating our personality.

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.

Mary: Hi everyone and welcome to DuckTales where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology and people building privacy tools for everyone. I’m Mary. I work on the brand side here at DuckDuckGo. Today we’re talking all things typography and more specifically how we developed DuckSans, our new custom typeface. So I’m here with Nirzar who beyond being our product design lead for AI, he’s a real typeface nerd and complained about our previous default typeface for, I don’t know, like five years, five plus years. So we had him lead the effort so he will be able to answer all of our questions. Nirzar, thanks for joining.

Nirzar: But yeah, Hey, hi, I’m glad we’re talking about fonts.

Mary: First prop use of the conversation. All right, I’m jumping right in. For folks who are less familiar, why does a typeface matter? Why not just use the defaults? What is the benefit? What are you trying to do by creating a custom one?

Nirzar: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think there is nothing wrong with using defaults to be honest. Nowadays default typefaces for operating systems are very well designed. Take San Francisco, Sans for example, by Apple is very well designed typeface and it’s going to be fine. I think the main part of this is mostly about what our product is. DuckDuckGo is a search engine, have UI chat. Most of our product, although it seems like it buttons in Chrome, Windows, most of it is actually with text content, like we take search results or take the AI chat with Apple. So around like 80% of product surface that you’re seeing is typography. We spent so much time on like thinking about color, this, that, buttons, styles. I think typography and type setting kind of require that much attention as well because they take like most of your screen when you’re using it. The reason for not using defaults, I think it’s where kind of the brand maturity sort of goes into it’s something we wanna do to kind of associate a kind of a feeling, kind of a look that we want to encode in our brand. I mean, I can go into a lot more detail about this, but just the idea is like, you want to make... Yeah, but like, yeah, the idea is you’re basically kind of creating an ownable sort of like element. I think typography is as important as the blue color that you use and the brand colors that you use and everything else.

Mary: I know you could. I know you could. I think the search engine as a surface is a good point to bring up because, know, obviously, like I mentioned, I work on the brand here at DuckDuckGo. And when you look at the search engine, you’re often questioning, you know, how can I inject more personality? How can I inject more of our, you know, our over our affect into the product and make people know when they look at it that this is DuckDuckGo. This isn’t Google. This isn’t Bing. And there’s really not much you have to work with.

Nirzar: Right.

Mary: Obviously you have the logo, but the typeface makes a huge difference. And so, for folks who haven’t seen it, this is where we rolled it out first. So you might have noticed a difference, but this was kind of one of our key areas we were most focused on. Nirzar, we began the exploration, what were the factors you were considering? Because obviously there’s hundreds of thousands, if not millions of typefaces that have been customized to choose from. What were you looking for specifically?

Nirzar: Yeah. I think the process starts with just collecting what are the use cases that we have, obviously, and what are the goals we have. I think in speaking about the goals, I think the main and most important thing, goes without saying, is just legibility and readability of things. And when I say that, it’s a little bit different than designing type setting for a book or something where it’s going to be read in a very specific setting and control that, you know, the paper you’re going to print it on. Like for us, we are talking about across devices, across platforms, across different types of screen densities. Like there’s many, factors that come into play when like somebody is going to look at your work, the design work that we’re doing or the product and run work we’re doing. So I think just considering all of those, tying that with this making it like the most functional but at the same time having more character so there are these like opposing sort of challenges as well you can’t have a lot of personality because then readability suffers if you focus only on readability then personality suffers then you have something that is like that looks bland and default it is extremely readable but you can’t tell it is DuckDuckGo so we were kind of like talking about the challenges and the spectrum of where to land on personality versus readability. And yeah, I think that being the goal, I think that’s where we started our exploration at.

Mary: Mm-hmm. You. Yeah. Was there something about the DuckDuckGo personality you wanted to bring out in particular? I mean, as folks know, we have a duck for the logo. Like there is a whimsical element to the brand that but you don’t want to go as far as like comic sans by any means. Like what were you most looking to play up when you talk personality? What was your goal?

Nirzar: Thank. Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s a very difficult challenge. I mean, definitely our brand is kind of, I don’t know, I really like it. It’s very quirky and sometimes goofy and derpy as well. But at the same time, we also care about trust and other things which are kind of, can seem very opposite point of view. But for me, it was more about like bringing a little bit of sort of pluck to it. So, and like the way it kind of gets codified into the shapes of the letters is more about like how certain things, what is the angle at which you cut the corners on a terminal of C for example, or the way you look at DuckSans Q, it’s very sharp and it’s very straight, but then you and other letters kind of complement the roundedness and friendliness into it. So it kind of like the, the kind of characters you’re looking for kind of trickle down into these like very specific things about shapes. Yeah, I mean, it’s not perceptible like right away when you look at it, but it is thought out. There’s thought behind all of these things.

Mary: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Hmm. That makes sense, yeah. But there is, yeah, definitely. I mean, even thinking about when you talk about it being standardized versus like when you change certain shapes, you’re making it less uniform in some ways. You’re making them certain things stand out. Like we spent a lot of time, I remember deciding how big to make the dot on the eye. And we were like, no, like a little bigger actually. And so it’s like to your point about it not being immediately perceptible. I think when you take a step back and you see it all together, maybe you notice something that doesn’t look quite as uniform, quite as standard.

Nirzar: Yes.

Mary: Which is what the brand is going for. But it is funny when you end up fighting or not fighting, discussing the I dot on the letter.

Nirzar: Yeah, I mean, it might, like, I really think, I think if you don’t work in typography or in design in general or brand, you might think that we’re just like fighting over or discussing non consequential things. But actually, what I care about mostly is having meaning to it and not just doing it for the sake of doing it, but actually like putting meaning behind, codifying values and trust and all of these things into visual like artifacts.

Mary: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so let’s get into a little bit how we found and started creating DuckSans. So DuckSans is based off of Pangea. Do you remember how you found Pangea or how you came across it?

Nirzar: I don’t quite remember but so Pangea is a typeface that was designed by Fontwork. It’s a type foundry in Germany. I remember using a Fontwork typeface few years ago on a project. So I basically like I have a that’s my like thing that I do in free time go to type foundries and look at that.

Mary: Yeah. Don’t tell people this. It’s too revealing.

Nirzar: But yeah, I think there has been a renaissance in type foundries recently. I think there’s a huge amount of work that is happening. And there’s a third wave of typography coming in, and digital typography particularly. There’s a lot of experimentation going on, variable typefaces, or even just doing very whack things, which are very cool in the last four or five years. So I was very excited to take on a typography project. I was like going through the Rolodex that I have for all the type boundaries to look at what is happening everywhere. Yeah, I think that’s, but I think particularly Pangea caught my eye just because how versatile it looked on the surface. It’s a variable typeface, but it’s just designed for scalability. And it also had a little bit of character to begin with before we customized it as well. But I think those were the kind of two things we are looking for is like something that is like durable, scalable and something that has character at the same time.

Mary: Mmm. Yeah. Did you feel that Pangea, sort of as a base, represented a lot of that legibility concerns? So we customized Pangea, so that’s where we ended up with DuckSans. There’s customizations and things we built in. What specifically, from your perspective, were we trying to achieve with the customization? Is it bringing out more character, or do you see it more as an engineering changes?

Nirzar: Yeah, we can get to engineering in just a bit. But before that, I think when I say scalability, I mean like literally scalability. We have a eight point gray link somewhere in the footer and we have large billboards. So like it’s really difficult to find like a silver bullet solution that can fit both of these cases. So I Pangea scales really well in terms of it’s actually two different typefaces, is specifically designed for to be used on large scale. This is what we call display typefaces. And we have a product layer which is specifically designed for legibility, readability, screen rendering. It can be readable on like 8.6 GB or anything like that. It’s just like made specifically for that. So this is what I mean by those two things. So that’s like part of, a little bit part of the customization. The font engineering is like a lot more deeper.

Mary: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, before we get into that, we, know, like to your point of like these nuances are things we notice, but not everyone would like we wouldn’t we one of the things we did was we tested this. So we did some pre testing with users or we’d show them our previous default and this one in different contexts. And I will say I was really surprised by the overwhelming preference for this new font. I was curious, like, were you surprised and what can you what can you share about the testing?

Nirzar: I was definitely surprised seeing a statistically significant difference between to grow test typefaces that are very similar. I mean, we tested what, like 2050 typefaces. But I think seeing that much difference in like perception was very, actually very comforting on the project itself and also like for me. Because I think it’s something that you are like so akin to, like if you use the product a lot and like you’re not gonna see it in one second like it’s it’s a longitudinal thing if you’re using something for 10 years and like suddenly the dot on the eye changes you’re going to notice it like you’re immediately going to notice it the last typography work that I did was with Wikipedia and I was like very contentious because there’s such a huge sort of like your eyes are kind of like dead set on like how it should look and if you think that it’s very very apparent exchange. But capturing that in the setting that we did was actually a surprise because you’re kind of showing a little bit of the context because of the constraints we had. It’s not something that you want to use and watch somebody use, get their feedback on these things. But yeah, mean, maybe people are a little bit more sensitive to these things right now than before. So I think that’s what kind of points it to me.

Mary: Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, I would believe that. And I mean, we tested it across like read, like, you know, you’re more functional, like readability, clarity, but also like, which is more memorable, which even just which do you prefer? Which do you which has more personality and overall, you know, to your point, like you could argue that two grotesque fonts, they look very similar, but people really did have a preference. And I think we’re really happy to see that it aligned with a lot of what we also felt was stronger and better represented the brand.

Nirzar: Yeah, I think that helped us a lot moving forward because I think it’s very difficult to kind of have similar things that both have trade-offs. I think research really helped us.

Mary: It. So what have I not asked you about the design of the typeface that you want to share? Because I’m sure there’s things I have not asked you. Because I want to ask you about the engineering effort. Because obviously from our standpoint, there are a lot of improvements we made to the readability of the typeface. But what have I not asked that I should?

Nirzar: I don’t know, I think... It’s really important to kind of like, like typefaces have become important. I think a lot of companies like Facebook and Google and everyone started investing into typography very recently. And there’s like wave of thing about like, everything started looking very similar to each other because it was all like indexed on how readable it is. And you can make an argument being like, the logical conclusion to a modern typeface is what everything should look like. I think that’s something that I struggled with personally as well, is to kind of like, how do we kind of break apart from it, but how do we also serve the function that typography is supposed to do? But I don’t know, I think it’s a spectrum. I think you and I worked on the spectrum a lot to figure out where we should land.

Mary: Mm. Yeah. Rest in peace, Rubear.

Nirzar: But yeah, Ruben is good. But yeah, I don’t know. It’s not a question that you didn’t ask. But I think it’s something that I think it’s worth calling out in this conversation, being like, hey, did you just make something that seems like everything else that is happening? And I think it’s the same with all logo as well. It’s like we can’t make our duck very much look like any other software company logo, but I love that we kind of keep that quirkiness and like deal with all its quirks like on everyday life when we are working with it.

Mary: I know he can only look right. He only has one. He can only see one direction. In terms of where we go from here for the typeface, you know, marketing, you know, one use case we’ve talked about is like where you can bring out more personality and characters when you’re doing marketing, advertising, things like that. Like, I think what we focus on was the product use case. But I imagine that there’s a lot of future work still to come when it comes to bringing like even amplifying that character more. Is there anything you’re particularly excited about or is it just a bigger effort to undertake that is upcoming?

Nirzar: Exactly. I think it’s more about having the capacity to, the capacity and foundation in the typeface to be something different for different scales and purposes. And that’s what we kind of like, I think we achieved that with DuckSans because like, if it’s not in a experimental enough, like identifiable, I think we have a great foundation in the structure of typeface to kind of like drive that chain forward. Like we have to keep those options open. So I think this extensibility, this property of extensibility is really important. And I think, yeah, I’m like super excited to like tomorrow figure out like, maybe we can do something weird with a of letters. And when it is used, I like 200 point size on a billboard and I think that can still carry the essence of main typeface but as a version that is made for particular use cases. I think just having that optionality itself is kind of like really good.

Mary: Hmm. Yeah, that’s a great point. I think my favorite is we have a normal ampersand and then we have an ampersand that looks like a duck, which we have yet to use. So you’re hearing it here first. Easter egg. It’s an Easter egg that has yet to be put anywhere. I don’t know. All right. Let’s talk a little bit about engineering. Let’s do Mohammed Proud here. Can you talk a little bit about what the engineering effort was like to get this on the SERP. Like I remember hearing about these like hour long calls where in my imagination you were like, Mohammed, add a space here. Like it was like, I was imagining you both like sort of custom fiddling and like changing the font manually. Was that what was happening or what was the process of typesetting this font?

Nirzar: Yes, it’s an Easter egg, I think if you find it. Yeah. Yeah, so the type setting part is actually took the longest time as well. I mean, like, yeah, you’re right. We were on calls for hours kind of figuring out how to implement and how to make use of it. The things that we were kind of working on an improvements from the status quo where things like using new rendering methods on web, something called like anti-aliasing and corners, painting on windows, our previous life was particularly broken on windows. I was very, whenever there was a curve anywhere, pixel part. But we were kind of like figuring out what are the best methods and the most modern methods to render on screens. The other part that we obviously have to think about, we are a website and an app at scale. Performance is key important metric for us. So just thinking about how we can reduce the load time, we are basically kind of improving upon a typeface, but new features mean more footprint. We definitely don’t want to delay page rendering in any way. If not, we have to make it better because we are now looking at this part of the software. So we’ve been working on optimizing how we can optimize the delivery of font files. So that goes into just insane amount of splitting our Unicode ranges from WAF2 files into this file and that file, basically having particular letters, let’s say your page is Greek, we just want to load the extra letters from the other character set into the main one, and not actually the separate typeface that has Greek in it. So just optimizing, optimizing this to the point of like just being like very bespoke about all of this because again, it’s like millions of users like everyone loads this all the time. So like being really on point and really getting into like the nitty gritty. Like I remember like working with Christoph from Fontwork where we are trying to separate characters for Cyrillic, but we even went further and we want to load only the accents not even the actual letter because we are like the a is the same but the accents are different so like let’s even split that out and there are these a lot of font engineering techniques like font work helps us in optimizing.

Mary: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Hmm. Is this like, is this trial and error that you’re finding this out or are you deep in some Reddit threads on type implementation?

Nirzar: Actually, yeah, I would have thought it would have been easy to find guidance on, this is, we are talking very specific things for very specific software. I didn’t find, because most people would give up on level two of optimization. We kind of went a little bit overboard. Actually, we went overboard that after we figured out our page, our search results are going to come after the point at this point. So, we’re like, we like this.

Mary: Hmm. Yeah. You. That’s amazing. Okay, I’m taking this completely out of this project. How many fonts do you think you have downloaded on your computer? Like, not even related to this, just generally, like how many custom fonts exist in your device?

Nirzar: I don’t know. Thousand? I want to say more than thousand? Hundred percent, yeah.

Mary: That was, that is insane. All right, any final words from you Nirzar on typeface, DuckSans, anything?

Nirzar: No, I mean try it out give us thought I was very happy like some of the community members noticed and actually said nice things about change which is a bit rare on the internet but it’s always good to see that. But yeah it’s like I’m like more excited to kind of like now propagate this more in other parts of the brand the word mark and things as well in the future. Also my typography professor would be proud.

Mary: Very proud. All right. Do you want to do you want to finish off by plugging your new album or should we leave that? All right. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Tune in next week. Yeah.

Nirzar: Oh my god, who’s that? Hey.