Inside DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo

Behind the scenes with the DuckDuckGo team — sharing insights on product, engineering, leadership, and AI. insideduckduckgo.substack.com

  1. Duck Tales: Why DuckDuckGo is building its own web search index (Ep.22)

    HÁ 27 MIN.

    Duck Tales: Why DuckDuckGo is building its own web search index (Ep.22)

    In this episode, Gabriel (Founder) and Caine (CTO, first employee) discuss the history of our search engine, why now is the right time to build a full web search index, and how our scale makes us uniquely positioned to ship, learn and iterate quickly. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy. Gabriel: Hello, welcome back to Duck Tales. I haven’t been here in a while. And I am Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo. And I have with me someone who I don’t think has been on Duck Tales at all yet, but you should know, Caine Tighe, who I know very well, who’s the first employee of DuckDuckGo and now our CTO. Caine. Caine: Hi Gabe. Gabriel: We’ve been working together for a very long time. And we’re here today to talk about something we’ve both been working on. Caine more than me, but I’m working on it some, which is our web search index. So as some background, first some background. DuckDuckGo started as a search engine, as many people know, and it was actually started by me. I was by myself for a few years. And the first thing I did was start crawling the web and building a web index. Caine: Yeah, for sure. Gabriel: But you know, I soon realized that that is very expensive, especially as one person. And there were other places to get a web index at the time. And what was more interesting was maybe adding value on top of the web index. So building other indexes, this was a time, this is the mid 2000s, you know, there weren’t, there obviously wasn’t AI, but there wasn’t even really many instant answers on search engines. Caine: I mean, that’s what we were working on together at the very, very beginning. Like we were working on, you know, you had the knowledge graph. It wasn’t called a knowledge graph at a time, but you were doing all the structured content from Wikipedia and otherwise. We worked on some other smaller indices. So yeah. And then actually fun fact, in hiring our backend project is still based on some of the original spam and content farm crawling, like one of the projects is based on some of the spam and content farm crawlers that you originally wrote. So that lives on 15 years. Gabriel: Yeah. So we were doing lots of indexing and lots of crawling. Yeah, exactly. Just not, you know, we started, but then we stopped doing a full web index, but just as examples, right? We started like the code that you were talking about indexing Wikipedia, which became our knowledge graph, you know, which is, powers a lot of answers, which also we used when we started working on AI answers. We’ve been doing local indexing for, you know, over a decade, local businesses and things like that. You know, then all sorts of kind of niche indexes that involve some crawling like lyrics and things like that. So indexing technology is not new to us, despite what some people say about it. Sometimes we do lots of search indexing, but we hadn’t been doing a full web index until relatively recently, last few years-ish. But now we are. And so the question is, the questions and why you’re here, and we’ll talk about it for a few minutes, is kind of why, what’s going on, how, all the main questions, which we’re obviously not all gonna answer today, but we can start with, I think, kind of the why, but why are we well positioned to work on this? So to speak, and you’re kind of at the center of it, so I think you’re a good person to ask. Caine: Yeah. I mean, I think, the why now is a mixture of like our needs. Like we want to support our own AI use cases. That’s we have two primary agent, agent driven products out. Search Assist, which is on the SERP, search engine results page, duckduckgo.com. And then we have Duck AI, which is our chatbot. And both of those products are hungry for this kind of data. So it, yeah, it just makes sense for that. Gabriel: Yeah, in particular, right. You could maybe talk percentages, but like there’s some percentage of search results now, what is it like 25%, I think that have Search Assist answers. And then, you know, the percentage better made for Duck AI, but some significant percent call the web, 15% maybe. Caine: Yeah, I always do. I do, I have my numbers based on, absolutes make more sense. Yeah, yeah, just, yeah. Gabriel: You know what? Bad question. Ignore numbers. Doesn’t matter. Good percentage of queries and Duck AI prompts require web search. And so we need a web index for it, essentially, right? Caine: Yeah. I mean, I think on the chatbot side, it’s really good, like to ground. If you’re deciding whether or not to ground and you’re on the line, you should probably use RAG, retrieval augmented grounding, and go out to a third party data set. For us, raising the standard of trust online. We want to do that because the more that you ground, it’s known empirically, the answers are better. So we err on the side of grounding where I think maybe not everybody does. So it’s really good that we need to build our own index in order to be able to accommodate that. So that’s kind of some of the why now. And again, it’s on Search Assist and it’s on Duck AI. One of my favorite parts about this whole thing is like, we’re very used to working for customers, like our end user. For the search index, duckduckgo.com itself is the customer. A very nuanced, unique thing for us to be able to serve ourselves, which creates this really tight feedback loop internally. So it’s been cool to like use our own and we are live for, you know, some amount of the traffic today. That’s just growing day over day for these use cases. Gabriel: That’s a good point because like, I think in terms of like our position, well, positioned to do it is, you know, being live, you know, maybe we talk about that a little bit, but like that creates a feedback loop that we have that a lot of people don’t have because we have, you know, many, many millions of people using our search engine and now Duck AI. And so we’re getting constant feedback about the relevancy of the search results that we’re serving, not to mention the fact that we have almost 20 years of evaluating relevancy ourself on our own search engine. Caine: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So like, humans are unsurprisingly and appropriately more, more critical of results than agents are. So it kind of creates this higher fidelity feedback loop because, you know, through our, through anonymization and whatever else, like we can privately understand what is most relevant on the internet for customers and users. And that really helps us to, positions us to be pretty competitive in the space quickly. So like, I think that’s kind of interesting and it’s exciting and like the true DuckDuckGo way as you and I know well, like we like to ship stuff. And so it’s been really cool to, yeah, like it’s just been really cool to be using it already and in production, our own index. And it creates that flywheel and we could, you know, use buzzwords like reinforcement learning and this, that, and the other thing. But at the end of the day, it’s just really the relationship of consuming your own internal API product. That’s the flywheel and allows you to like establish relative priority really quickly and be like, I ran this experiment. Like we really think this query set is going to be well suited to our own index. And then we tried and we’re like, we’re not working that well on that. Let’s move to this other one. And then it just changes the game for how quickly you can iterate, which has been really exciting for, and I know the team’s really excited about it too, because engineers like to ship things. So that’s been cool. Gabriel: Perfect, I think that’s a good intro. But let’s do, to your point about buzzwords, let’s do a few more buzzwords in terms of like, just give us the broad tech flow, like, you know, without getting too deep into anything, but just to give people a sense of kind of how it works and then maybe. Caine: Yeah, so kind of the way that I think about this is like a little pipe or a train or whatever. You have your frontier that kind of is the web that you’re looking to crawl, like, because you have to pick what your frontier is. Then you crawl that. Crawling, all of these components are extremely complicated by themselves. To crawl, it means like, you need to crawl politely. Some sites want you to crawl, some sites don’t want you to crawl. And so to be a good trustworthy netizen, you have to respect those things. And that’s an important part of crawling. It’s also important to have the bandwidth and the throughput to crawl at the scale that you need to crawl. And so fortunately for us, we’ve had a lot of experience with that, so we have that. The rendering side, you have to, when you fetch content, you have to render, including JavaScript and everything else like that. The only way to get the content is to literally run the whole webpage. Otherwise, like you get no content. So that’s quite an expensive process. So we kind of do a naive approach and then a more complicated rendered approach. Then you have content extraction, which is like the next step, where you think about your title, your description, your headings, metadata, main body stuff, where you extract the content, what the page actually means. And then we’re very fortunate in today’s day and age to have semantics. So semantic search is a big part of the pipeline. And what that means is what people are calling embeddings. And you calculate embeddings on extracted content. And then we use a database, which I quite like, called Vespa. And it’s all ingested into Vespa. In my opinion, kind of your indexing, your ingestion, your features, how you calculate those things, and how they describe, that’s a big description of your product. Because i

    13min
  2. Duck Tales: Browser onboarding — why first impressions matter, user education, and the role of personality (Ep.21)

    HÁ 6 DIAS

    Duck Tales: Browser onboarding — why first impressions matter, user education, and the role of personality (Ep.21)

    This episode, Mary (Associate VP, Brand) Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Bobby (Director, Product) discuss how DuckDuckGo’s browser onboarding was designed, why it matters for a privacy browser, and how Dax’s personality helps users feel confident in their protections. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy. Mary: Hi everyone and welcome to Duck Tales where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss stories, technology and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering and our approach to AI. I’m Mary McGee, I work on brand and marketing here at DuckDuckGo and I have two fellow product folks here with me today that I will let introduce themselves. Beah, why don’t you start? Beah: I’m Beah, I’m on the product team. How was that? Mary: I mean, I couldn’t have done that. You did great. Bobby. Bobby: This is stuff. I’m Bobby. I’m also on the product team. Mary: Wow, this was good. Beah: And furthermore, we both have the word burger in our last names. Mary: That’s true. Bobby: This is true. Mary: We are here to talk about browser onboarding today. And we have both Beah and Bobby here as folks that have worked on onboarding over the years. We can take you back to its origin. We can take you to some of the new changes. That’s kind of what we’re gonna do here and talk a little bit more about it. So why don’t we jump right in? I think, you know, why don’t I ask this to you Beah? Why don’t we start with you? What do we mean by browser onboarding? Like what is effective onboarding and why do you think it’s important for a privacy browser to nail this? Beah: Yeah, so I think of onboarding as like, basically, the user’s first experience getting to know the app, what is this, how do I use it, and potentially beyond that first experience, could onboarding could last over multiple uses of the app or multiple days. But like the thing that you need to do to get a user from interested, sure, I’ll download it to like, I know how to use this. I know what this is. I know what the value is to me. I know that I want to keep using it ideally. And it’s really important, I think, for probably any app because many, I think for most app categories, the majority of users become non-users after one initial trial of the app, if not the majority, certainly a lot. And so that is a very important moment to show users what you are and what value you can bring to them. And to your question about for a privacy app or privacy browser, I think one of the challenges is that our apps are browsers with a built-in search engine, and all of that should just work. And the privacy protections that we’re providing, for the most part, aren’t really visible for intentional and just organic reasons, like we don’t want to get in your way, and like when, like the absence of bad things is just kind of invisible. So like, you know, I think it’s important for us in particular to like communicate in onboarding what actually is happening when you use the app. Mary: So there’s like an explanation component of like how to use the app. And then there’s sort of a first impression, like this is who we are, this is how you should feel using it. Bobby, like can you talk a little bit about the role of the more like emotive kind of relationship in onboarding? Bobby: Yeah, ultimately, there are, I think, stages to actually understanding and feeling connected with an app. And the first one is just knowing what it does. But there are stages beyond that which are feeling connected with what it does and really feeling like you understand it through experience, not just in theory. And so we try to reveal both through the tone with which we describe things and just really emphasizing demonstration and nudging you to try our features and see them and experiencing them for the first time and let you draw your own conclusions about whether that serves you. Mary: There’s this line in our current onboarding that’s like, it’s something about a tracker losing its wings. Beah, has that been in there since the beginning or is that like... Beah: Well, yeah, since I’ve been working on onboarding, which is like seven years maybe now, it was one of the first big projects that I worked on after I joined DuckDuckGo. Yeah, I think that, I mean, that copy was part of the, I think every time you browse with me, a creepy ad loses its wings. I think that copy came out of the very first version that we pushed live. And yeah, I don’t know. I think it actually hits with people. I mean, maybe, probably not all people, but just all things. I just remember, first of all, the early versions of that onboarding, some of the copy was super silly. I was hand sketching things and just saying whatever I wanted. And then our copy team had a little conversation with me and was like, hmm, maybe we can dial it down a smidge and I was like okay yeah maybe. Mary: It’s, yeah, but it’s a good example of what Bobby you’re mentioning and Beah, your point. Like, it’s like, how do you talk about what the product does, but do it in a way that develops that sort of emotional connection. And it’s a funny testament that it stayed around this long. Since you, go ahead. Beah: I was gonna say, I remember like user testing in like doing video user testing sessions with some of the early prototypes, which were like messy and weird and like hearing participants like laugh out loud, like chortle, say like wow and shriek or like, get mad. Like just have like an emotional reaction that like I definitely had not seen in user testing other components of the app. And I remember being like, I was still relatively new to DuckDuckGo. And I was like, this feels like it’s like doing something different, but maybe I’m just like, want it to feel like that. And I remember sending the videos to our like, kind of head of user insights and being like, am I wrong? Or is this like, are people like really having a reaction? And he was like, no, that’s yeah, they’re spitting their water out. Like, yeah, that’s interesting. Mary: A chortle. Haven’t heard one of those in many, many years. I mean, since you mentioned it, Beah, like what was onboarding before? So we were talking about onboarding as this like personality, emotive. We can get into who Dax is as we talk about this, but I’m curious, like when you started, when you were doing these explorations and these videos, like what did we have and what were you, what sort of made you start doing this? Like why did you start the exploration that you did? Beah: Yeah, it’s funny because we had these, I think the onboarding that we replaced was these tooltips that popped up as you moved around the app that were like, this is the fire button, it burns things, this is where you type, I don’t know. And I realized in retrospect after we launched this that on paper it was not that different. We went from tooltips explaining some of the features of the app to what we call Dax dialogues, our mascot Dax telling you things, but there were just a lot of details, I think, that made it feel very different. You could almost imagine the same onboarding coming out of the same written spec, like both, sorry, both very different onboardings coming out of the same written spec, but in practice and application, they felt very different. Mary: Hmm, that makes sense. Do you have, I know you have maybe some images to share at some point, but yeah, we can always throw these in in post. But I want to, if there’s, yeah, if you want to share, we can always take a look. Beah: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can share things. I don’t know. Wait, okay, I think I can share things. Oh boy, I gotta do settings. You talk amongst yourselves. Mary: In the meantime, Bobby, I’m curious, like you came into onboarding. So Bobby came in and was sort of tasked. It was maybe your first project of how can we improve this thing that is working really well, which is not the easiest task. I’m curious, like, what was your first impression? What did you think was working? Where did you want to focus your time? Bobby: Yeah, I think, well, we’ve been talking about the feeling that we were trying to evoke from people. And one thing that immediately was already working in the version that Beah had previously done is helping you feel confident in the app about how to protect your privacy. And I think that’s a pretty high bar. That’s kind of a challenging thing. Privacy protections can be this vague, intimidating concept, but the tone and particularly using Dax’s voice to deliver these messages was not only unique to really any browser that I had seen, but certainly unique for a pretty serious topic and something that is somewhat technical to understand. So the first thing that stood out to me was that lighthearted approach and the lighthearted language while still being very clear that you can be confident that your protections are active and working for you. And then I guess the second thing I mentioned a little bit earlier, which is just really focusing on demonstrating and helping you experience things. The aha moment for me, and I think a lot of the user tests that we observed was when you see the trackers that are being blocked on the first page you visit and it names the companies. You can find that on any page in DuckDuckGo just by clicking on the shield in the address bar, but to reveal it and the first time you visit any page with trackers that are blocked, you see that list right at the top of the screen. And I think that is really illuminating and eye-opening to understand that it’s actually working and that these trackers might be even more prevalent than you think. And they’re probabl

    22min
  3. Duck Tales: How we work at DuckDuckGo — remote-first, with memorable meetups (Ep20).

    25 DE FEV.

    Duck Tales: How we work at DuckDuckGo — remote-first, with memorable meetups (Ep20).

    In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and John (People Ops) discuss aynchronous working, no meeting days, and the role of face to face meetups. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy. Beah: Hello, and welcome to DuckTales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. This is my dog, Friday. He’s appeared in other episodes. So in each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or our approach to AI. John: Hello. Beah: In this episode, you will be hearing about our approach to remote work. I’ll quickly introduce myself. I’m Beah. I am on the product team at DuckDuckGo. Then, John, I’ll let you introduce yourself. John: Thanks, Beah. Yeah, my name’s John. I work on the People Ops team at DuckDuckGo. You can probably hear from my accent. I’m one of the couple of members of the team that’s based in the UK. So my job is predominantly around meetups and a little bit about culture, but predominantly about meetups and how we meet up in person and a little bit virtually as well. So yeah, that’s my role here. Beah: Great. Yeah, so that is a good segue to jumping right into talking about how we work remotely and how we connect personally given the remote circumstance. So maybe just before we get too deep into the details and what we actually do, can you describe, John, just like what we even mean when we say that we’re a remote company? John: Yeah. So in very simplistic terms, I would see being a remote company as us not all going to one central place to work. You know, we don’t have a big office building that we all come into either on a semi-regular or, you know, an everyday basis. So that is people probably predominantly working from home, but not necessarily. We have ways and means at DuckDuckGo for people to work, you know, in a co-working space with other people if they need that or if they have circumstances at home where they need to. Essentially, there’s a choice and a trust in where people work. We feel, you know, there’s pros and cons to that, but we feel there’s a, you know, overall a net positive, I think, to that way of working. So that’s the way I would think about it, that we work in that way. And then to facilitate that happening, you know, all companies will have tools to, you know, online digital tools to allow people to collaborate and move their work forward. But we maybe think a bit more or maybe have a few more tools that allow us to collaborate digitally and make sure that we do what we need to do online essentially and digitally. Beah: Do you know, you might not, but do you know how many people do work from co-working spaces or somewhere social that is not their home? John: Yeah, not too many in the company. So we offer a financial element for everybody if they want to work in a co-working space. I think we definitely have a handful of people, certainly in our organization, who pretty permanently work in co-working spaces. And that may range from family circumstances or living circumstances, whether it’s just difficult to work from home, through to people that just need that kind of social interaction each day. And that’s what makes them more productive. I think there’s a handful that work fairly permanently from coworking spaces. And then there’s definitely a good chunk of the organization that will treat themselves for a day in a coworking space, maybe once a month or meet up with somebody to work with. But yeah, I’d say that most of our team day to day will work from home, really, have a set up at home. Yeah. Beah: Yeah. And I guess, I mean, we have, maybe I’m getting ahead of the conversation, but we also have plenty of locations where there’s like clusters of DuckDuckGo people, like a dozen people or five people or just three people, and they will sometimes get together, either like work together or just like grab dinner, grab lunch, right? John: Yeah. And that’s happening more and more as we, you know, as we get bigger. You know, I had a quick look at our stats before we started this conversation, you know, 10 years ago, we were around 30 people. So, you know, meeting up was much harder. Now, you know, 10 times that amount. You know, for example, I know there’s a meetup happening in Spain. I can’t remember if it’s Barcelona or Madrid, but there’s a meetup happening soon just because we’ve had a lot of new starters start in that region. So somebody thought, well, that would be nice. We can get to our different types of meetups and how we arrange that. But that’s really cool. We’ve had a few people start in Spain and someone’s thought it’d be really nice to meet up in person. So yeah, whether that’s sometimes dinner or just a co-working day, we’re becoming more and more common. Beah: Okay. I actually am in the midst of planning a family vacation to London and we have a ton of folks there and I am gonna try to plan a meal and see as many people as are willing to come meet me for a meal. John: Yeah. You see, that’s nice. That says something that you don’t want to have for your holiday and completely not see anybody from work. That’s kind of nice. There will be some people who don’t want to do that. But yeah, that’s really cool. That’s really nice. Yeah, we’ve got a lot of folks in London. Beah: Yeah. Yeah, I actually like that. It’ll be cool for my family members to meet folks too, because they, especially as we’ve gotten bigger, they know fewer and fewer of the people that I spend my day with, and so I’m excited. John: Yeah, yeah that’s nice, that’s really cool. Beah: Okay, all right, I kind of got us a little off track there, but I think that’s okay. So tell me a little bit about like, you know, given that we’re just everywhere in the world, how do we do meetings generally? What kinds of meetings? How do we talk live to each other? John: Yep, no, don’t worry. Yeah, I mean, taking a step before how we do meetings, I would say we make an effort in some ways not to do meetings if we can, let that go. So another way of thinking of working remotely or as we, it’s a bit of a pretentious term, asynchronous working or async working. I know when I said that to my family, they were like, what? I was like, essentially we work online, but we write a lot of stuff down. That’s the way I would think of async working. We maybe write more stuff down than a lot of other companies would. So I would say we don’t try and avoid meetings for the sake of it. But I would say that if we can, we try to do things async if we can. And even if we do have meetings at DuckDuckGo, we try and do as much prep before that to save as much time in those meetings as well. And I know I found it slightly disconcerting, but also amazing when I joined DuckDuckGo that sometimes we had a meeting in the diary for half an hour and in previous organizations, half an hour wouldn’t have been enough to cover it. But not only that at DuckDuckGo, we finish the meeting sometimes in like nine minutes because there’s been a lot of chat before the meeting and you sometimes feel like, well, this feels a bit too easy, but it’s because that work has been done already and the meeting is just a really important thing for us to align and if there is anything else. You know, we, other people have maybe talked about this on this, we, Wednesdays and Thursdays are non-meeting days for us in terms of standing meetings. You know, we try and keep those, well, we do keep those for deep work. We don’t make exceptions to that rule. So we do use Zoom, you know, for, and we have, and I really like this, we have a number of processes, I guess, whether that’s kicking off a project or post, what we call post-morteming a project where we, I would go so far as to say we mandate, don’t we, getting together in person, we think getting together on Zoom is important to do those meetings. And we don’t make exceptions to that. And that’s what I mean by having sometimes a very quick meeting, we decide what processes require a meeting. So yeah, most of them done through Zoom. I think it’s very rare at DuckDuckGo to have really more than a half hour meeting, isn’t it? For most project kickoffs and post-mortems team meetings, maybe a little bit longer, but even then we pack quite a lot in. So yeah, most of our meetings are done online and we try and keep them as minimal as possible and as useful as possible. Yeah. Beah: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the way I think about it is like, we, I feel like we try to, you know, reason from first principles about when a meeting is the right venue for something rather than defaulting to meeting. And so there are times when that is absolutely critical. Then there, and there’s times when it’s actually like not the best way to make a decision or come to some conclusion or a hybrid is the best model, like you said, of thinking it through, writing it down ahead of the meeting, meeting to pull out the nuances, do the things that happen really well live. And then also we try to like, you know, we kind of have a principle of like a decision isn’t really made in a meeting. Like a decision can kind of be discovered and cultivated and then we kind of like write it down because there are times when you’re like, you’re caught up in the moment of the meeting and maybe the social dynamics or I don’t know, you’re just, you’re thinking on the spot and then afterwards, you know, in a moment of reflection or writing like, you think, well, maybe that’s actually not the logical answer. John: Absolutely, yeah. And I think another thing I found about meetings at DuckDuckGo, you know, I’ve been here about three years and thi

    28min
  4. Duck Tales: Why DuckDuckGo acquired Removaly to expand its privacy offering (Ep.19)

    18 DE FEV.

    Duck Tales: Why DuckDuckGo acquired Removaly to expand its privacy offering (Ep.19)

    In this episode, Cristina (CMO) and John (Marketing, previously co-founder of Removaly) discuss the acquisition process, adjusting to DuckDuckGo culture, and how Removaly has informed our customer service and product strategy. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy. Show notes: Learn more about the DuckDuckGo Subscription, including Personal Information Removal. Cristina Hi, and welcome to DuckTales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or approach to AI. I’m Cristina on the marketing team, and today we’ll be talking to John about DuckDuckGo’s acquisition of Removaly, where John was a co-founder and is how we were lucky enough to get him on our team. John, would you like to say hi and introduce yourself? John Yeah, absolutely. I’m John Bourscheid. I’m also on the marketing and communications team. I dabble in basically everything digital marketing, customer support, SEO, and I’m really glad to be here. Cristina Thank you, John. So in 2022, DuckDuckGo made our first acquisition, Removaly, to accelerate building the DuckDuckGo subscription, which today includes a VPN, personal information removal, identity theft restoration, and advanced AI models. So John, first question is an easy one. What was Removaly? What problem was it solving? John Yeah, absolutely. Removaly was a small startup in the data removal space. It was geared towards helping users remove their personal information from data brokers and people search sites quickly, effectively, and completely hands off. We automated the removal process. We provided users with real-time dashboards on removal progress, and we scanned daily to ensure that removed personal information stayed offline. Opting out of those sites manually is pretty complex, which is where services like ours came in. As far as problems, our user base really faced like a full variety of problems from general avoidance of public facing personal details to more proactive removal just for privacy sake to reactive responses from things like doxing, swatting, stalking, you name it, honestly. Cristina Yeah, those are scary, serious problems. Even for someone who hasn’t faced those problems, but is just on a search for their name, it’s super creepy having all that info show. John Yeah. Cristina So what was it like building and scaling Removaly? John It was awesome. My co-founder Kyle and I, we were the only two employees at Removaly outside of an awesome part-time support specialist we hired towards our final months of operation. So Kyle and I started kind of ideating in late 2019. At the time we both had full-time jobs, so it was more of a side project for us. The business was just bootstrapped by Kyle and I from day one. We put our own money into it and we never raised any investor money at any point. So we spent 18 months building and testing the product. Kyle handled the full stack of our dashboards and automations, and I built our public facing site and handled the marketing, communications, and growth aspects. We dabbled in each other’s spaces just to kind of test and validate things. And at the time we were the only US-based and self-funded data removal service, as well as the only service that scanned daily. And I think we still were. As far as scaling goes, we focused mostly on content marketing in the interest of both costs and longevity. We offered free opt-out guides for every site that we covered with our paid service. We did comparison guides between us and competing services, and we offered extensive privacy resources. That content quality really led to extensive organic traffic for relevant search terms, and then active engagement in communities such as IndieHackers, Reddit, and Twitter really helped us grow via word of mouth. But besides the daily scanning, our other main differentiator was support. While there were only two of us working on Removaly part-time, we offered Live Chat, which was super effective in gaining insights into what our existing and our prospective users were looking for in a service. We took this feedback to heart and we used it to iterate on our own product wherever we possibly could. While it definitely made the scaling aspect super difficult, it really wasn’t impossible, it was just exhausting. And this is honestly one of the main reasons that Kyle and I followed through with getting acquired by DuckDuckGo. Cristina That does sound exhausting, but kudos for really listening to users and really wanting them. John Absolutely. Cristina What were your initial thoughts and what was the acquisition process like? John The first signal we got was several DuckDuckGo team members signed up for Removaly on the same day, including our founder Gabriel. When DuckDuckGo first reached out to connect with us, we kind of assumed that they were looking at offering our services to their employees as we were actively working on entering the B2B space with Removaly. Whenever they reached out and floated an acquisition, we discussed it a lot. Everyone we interacted with on the DuckDuckGo team was awesome and the acquisition process went relatively smoothly. It was extensive and thorough for sure. It took about six months from start to finish, but we brought on a guy named Sean Flynn to assist from a mergers and acquisitions perspective as it was totally new territory for both Kyle and I. And he did a great job helping guide us through the process to an amicable conclusion. This is kind of where I dropped the big claim to fame that Kyle and I have of we never met in person until the day we had acquired. In fact, the entire Removaly product was built and for the first year it was run without us even having a phone call. The whole thing was done on Slack. Cristina That’s incredible. And it reminds me of DuckDuckGo’s founder and first employee meeting online. I guess it meant you were well prepared to work in our fully remote company. John Yeah, for sure. Cristina So what was it like joining DuckDuckGo, figuring out our culture, processes, and going from a team of two to 200? John To be honest, the way things that are configured and structured here made it a breeze. Every aspect of DuckDuckGo is meticulous, it’s thorough, and it’s well documented. So learning the ropes here was super simple compared to prior workplaces I’ve been at, at least in my experience. The culture here is really unlike anything I’ve ever experienced anywhere I’ve ever worked. Having built Removaly entirely on Slack, we got used to documenting everything we did. This translated super well to DuckDuckGo’s cultural strategy of working in the open, which makes questioning assumptions and validating direction a really natural step in the process. Cristina Did anything surprise you? John To be candid, we first assumed that the privacy first aspect of DuckDuckGo was less important than dollars, as is the case with pretty much every other tech company we came across. After all, how could a company really have such name recognition and growth with so few employees while leaving a bunch of money on the table? But after we digested the company culture and the processes and the principles and how things are run, it was obvious that we were way off in that assumption. I’ve really never seen a company like this where we just truly take privacy seriously, put it at the forefront of everything we do and do so purposefully, even at the detriment of revenue. It’s really impressive and admirable. And I’m really glad to be able to be part of a great crew. The motto that we don’t track our users is not really just fly by night. It really is how we do things here. And it consistently impresses me even over three years into this. Cristina I agree. And what can I say except we talk the talk, we walk the walk. As challenging as it can be, it’s a big part of what makes working at DuckDuckGo so special. John For sure. Yep. Cristina So how has Removaly informed DuckDuckGo’s personal information removal? John Yeah, so the initial plan was to deconstruct Removaly completely and then rebuild it with stronger privacy controls and rebuild it on device, which was and still is a major differentiator in this data removal space. For a bit, I was focused on assisting in this endeavor wherever possible using my very, very scattered skill set. The on-device aspect was pivotal to truly ensure users’ privacy, and it took a ton of development and testing to make it a reality. There was, to me, a lot of awe and admiration that I felt watching Kyle essentially build a business from scratch by hand in 18 months with Removaly. I really got to relive that from a totally different perspective watching several of the most talented developers and designers I’ve ever seen do it all over again on steroids. It was super, super cool to watch. Cristina So what’s next for personal information removal? John The data removal space has gotten super turbulent in the past few years to the point where some of our competitors have shut their doors completely. It’s a constant battle with people search sites to effectively and automatically process and submit these opt out requests for people. Despite this, we’ve kept our heads above water. We figured out connections between sites and we’ve been reworking our processes to effectively continue to remove personal information automatically for our subscribers. The regulatory space for data brokers is also changing constantly. We’ve been working on collaborating with other services and regulatory agencies on the most effective ways to keep this dissemination of personal information at bay. So it’s a

    11min
  5. Duck Tales: Duck Sans — designing a typeface that balances functionality and brand (ep.18)

    11 DE FEV.

    Duck Tales: Duck Sans — designing a typeface that balances functionality and brand (ep.18)

    In this episode, Mary (Senior Director, Brand), and Nirzar (AI Design Lead) discuss why we developed a new typeface, how we implemented it, and its role in communicating our personality. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy. Mary: Hi everyone and welcome to DuckTales where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology and people building privacy tools for everyone. I’m Mary. I work on the brand side here at DuckDuckGo. Today we’re talking all things typography and more specifically how we developed DuckSans, our new custom typeface. So I’m here with Nirzar who beyond being our product design lead for AI, he’s a real typeface nerd and complained about our previous default typeface for, I don’t know, like five years, five plus years. So we had him lead the effort so he will be able to answer all of our questions. Nirzar, thanks for joining. Nirzar: But yeah, Hey, hi, I’m glad we’re talking about fonts. Mary: First prop use of the conversation. All right, I’m jumping right in. For folks who are less familiar, why does a typeface matter? Why not just use the defaults? What is the benefit? What are you trying to do by creating a custom one? Nirzar: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think there is nothing wrong with using defaults to be honest. Nowadays default typefaces for operating systems are very well designed. Take San Francisco, Sans for example, by Apple is very well designed typeface and it’s going to be fine. I think the main part of this is mostly about what our product is. DuckDuckGo is a search engine, have UI chat. Most of our product, although it seems like it buttons in Chrome, Windows, most of it is actually with text content, like we take search results or take the AI chat with Apple. So around like 80% of product surface that you’re seeing is typography. We spent so much time on like thinking about color, this, that, buttons, styles. I think typography and type setting kind of require that much attention as well because they take like most of your screen when you’re using it. The reason for not using defaults, I think it’s where kind of the brand maturity sort of goes into it’s something we wanna do to kind of associate a kind of a feeling, kind of a look that we want to encode in our brand. I mean, I can go into a lot more detail about this, but just the idea is like, you want to make... Yeah, but like, yeah, the idea is you’re basically kind of creating an ownable sort of like element. I think typography is as important as the blue color that you use and the brand colors that you use and everything else. Mary: I know you could. I know you could. I think the search engine as a surface is a good point to bring up because, know, obviously, like I mentioned, I work on the brand here at DuckDuckGo. And when you look at the search engine, you’re often questioning, you know, how can I inject more personality? How can I inject more of our, you know, our over our affect into the product and make people know when they look at it that this is DuckDuckGo. This isn’t Google. This isn’t Bing. And there’s really not much you have to work with. Nirzar: Right. Mary: Obviously you have the logo, but the typeface makes a huge difference. And so, for folks who haven’t seen it, this is where we rolled it out first. So you might have noticed a difference, but this was kind of one of our key areas we were most focused on. Nirzar, we began the exploration, what were the factors you were considering? Because obviously there’s hundreds of thousands, if not millions of typefaces that have been customized to choose from. What were you looking for specifically? Nirzar: Yeah. I think the process starts with just collecting what are the use cases that we have, obviously, and what are the goals we have. I think in speaking about the goals, I think the main and most important thing, goes without saying, is just legibility and readability of things. And when I say that, it’s a little bit different than designing type setting for a book or something where it’s going to be read in a very specific setting and control that, you know, the paper you’re going to print it on. Like for us, we are talking about across devices, across platforms, across different types of screen densities. Like there’s many, factors that come into play when like somebody is going to look at your work, the design work that we’re doing or the product and run work we’re doing. So I think just considering all of those, tying that with this making it like the most functional but at the same time having more character so there are these like opposing sort of challenges as well you can’t have a lot of personality because then readability suffers if you focus only on readability then personality suffers then you have something that is like that looks bland and default it is extremely readable but you can’t tell it is DuckDuckGo so we were kind of like talking about the challenges and the spectrum of where to land on personality versus readability. And yeah, I think that being the goal, I think that’s where we started our exploration at. Mary: Mm-hmm. You. Yeah. Was there something about the DuckDuckGo personality you wanted to bring out in particular? I mean, as folks know, we have a duck for the logo. Like there is a whimsical element to the brand that but you don’t want to go as far as like comic sans by any means. Like what were you most looking to play up when you talk personality? What was your goal? Nirzar: Thank. Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s a very difficult challenge. I mean, definitely our brand is kind of, I don’t know, I really like it. It’s very quirky and sometimes goofy and derpy as well. But at the same time, we also care about trust and other things which are kind of, can seem very opposite point of view. But for me, it was more about like bringing a little bit of sort of pluck to it. So, and like the way it kind of gets codified into the shapes of the letters is more about like how certain things, what is the angle at which you cut the corners on a terminal of C for example, or the way you look at DuckSans Q, it’s very sharp and it’s very straight, but then you and other letters kind of complement the roundedness and friendliness into it. So it kind of like the, the kind of characters you’re looking for kind of trickle down into these like very specific things about shapes. Yeah, I mean, it’s not perceptible like right away when you look at it, but it is thought out. There’s thought behind all of these things. Mary: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Hmm. That makes sense, yeah. But there is, yeah, definitely. I mean, even thinking about when you talk about it being standardized versus like when you change certain shapes, you’re making it less uniform in some ways. You’re making them certain things stand out. Like we spent a lot of time, I remember deciding how big to make the dot on the eye. And we were like, no, like a little bigger actually. And so it’s like to your point about it not being immediately perceptible. I think when you take a step back and you see it all together, maybe you notice something that doesn’t look quite as uniform, quite as standard. Nirzar: Yes. Mary: Which is what the brand is going for. But it is funny when you end up fighting or not fighting, discussing the I dot on the letter. Nirzar: Yeah, I mean, it might, like, I really think, I think if you don’t work in typography or in design in general or brand, you might think that we’re just like fighting over or discussing non consequential things. But actually, what I care about mostly is having meaning to it and not just doing it for the sake of doing it, but actually like putting meaning behind, codifying values and trust and all of these things into visual like artifacts. Mary: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so let’s get into a little bit how we found and started creating DuckSans. So DuckSans is based off of Pangea. Do you remember how you found Pangea or how you came across it? Nirzar: I don’t quite remember but so Pangea is a typeface that was designed by Fontwork. It’s a type foundry in Germany. I remember using a Fontwork typeface few years ago on a project. So I basically like I have a that’s my like thing that I do in free time go to type foundries and look at that. Mary: Yeah. Don’t tell people this. It’s too revealing. Nirzar: But yeah, I think there has been a renaissance in type foundries recently. I think there’s a huge amount of work that is happening. And there’s a third wave of typography coming in, and digital typography particularly. There’s a lot of experimentation going on, variable typefaces, or even just doing very whack things, which are very cool in the last four or five years. So I was very excited to take on a typography project. I was like going through the Rolodex that I have for all the type boundaries to look at what is happening everywhere. Yeah, I think that’s, but I think particularly Pangea caught my eye just because how versatile it looked on the surface. It’s a variable typeface, but it’s just designed for scalability. And it also had a little bit of character to begin with before we customized it as well. But I think those were the kind of two things we are looking for is like something that is like durable, scalable and something that has character at the same time. Mary: Mmm. Yeah. Did you feel that Pangea, sort of as a base, represented a lot of that legibility concerns? So we customized Pangea, so that’s where we ended up with DuckSans. There’s customizations and things we built in. What specifically, from your perspective, were we trying to achieve with the customization? Is it bringing out more character, or do you see it more as an engineering

    24min
  6. Duck Tales: How DuckDuckGo blocks trackers on third-party websites (Ep.17)

    4 DE FEV.

    Duck Tales: How DuckDuckGo blocks trackers on third-party websites (Ep.17)

    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

    15min
  7. Duck Tales: Yes AI or No AI? The thinking behind DuckDuckGo’s public AI vote (Ep.16)

    28 DE JAN.

    Duck Tales: Yes AI or No AI? The thinking behind DuckDuckGo’s public AI vote (Ep.16)

    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

    18min
  8. Duck Tales: Duck Player — a free, private way to watch YouTube videos, with fewer ads & no distractions (Ep.15)

    14 DE JAN.

    Duck Tales: Duck Player — a free, private way to watch YouTube videos, with fewer ads & no distractions (Ep.15)

    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

    13min
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Sobre

Behind the scenes with the DuckDuckGo team — sharing insights on product, engineering, leadership, and AI. insideduckduckgo.substack.com

Informações

  • Criado por
    DuckDuckGo
  • Anos de atividade
    2025 - 2026
  • Episódios
    22
  • Classificação
    Livre
  • Copyright
    © DuckDuckGo
  • Site do podcast
    Inside DuckDuckGo

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