Inside DuckDuckGo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dave: Yep. Yep.

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

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

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

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

Beah: Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dave: That’s right. That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dave: That’s right.

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

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

Beah: Later.

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

Curious how people voted? Head to VoteYesOrNoAI.com

Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary: Thanks, see ya, bye Kamyl.

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

Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.

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

Beah: Hello and welcome to DuckTales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product, updates, approach to AI, or how we operate as a company. In this episode, you’ll hear about a feature called... Oh, Omid, do you want to say it?

Omid: Duck Player

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beah: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beah: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Omid: Yeah, thank you. Likewise.

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

Omid: Sounds good. Thanks, Beah.

Beah: Alright. Later.

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

Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ewa Yes.

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

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

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

Ewa Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

Gabriel Yeah ⁓

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

Ewa Thanks, Gabriel. Thanks, everyone.

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

Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.

Show notes: See our full list of donations here.

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

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

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

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

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

Joe: Thank you.

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

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

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

Joe: Yeah

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

Joe: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe: Yeah

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

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

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

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

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

Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.

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

Zbig: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beah: Where are you located today?

Zbig:

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

Zbig: yeah, for sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zbig: Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zbig: Right. Later. Yeah, yeah,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beah: Alright, see you later!

Zbig: See ya.

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

Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beah: That’d be great.

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

Beah: Okay. Okay.

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

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

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

Beah: Yeah.

Max: getting through these dark patterns.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beah: Mm-hmm. Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Max: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Max: Yeah, thank you for having me.

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

Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.

Show notes: Learn more about the DuckDuckGo Subscription here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris: Yeah. So.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris: It is, yeah.

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

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

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

Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chuck: Yeah. That’s probably fair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.

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

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

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

Esteban: Sure.

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

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

Gabriel: Good answer.

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

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

Esteban: Definitely Right.Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Esteban: Exactly.

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

Esteban: second.

Gabriel: kind of blown away first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Esteban: Okay.

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