Inside DuckDuckGo

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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com

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 is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com

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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com

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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com

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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com

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 is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com

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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com

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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com

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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com

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.

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