Inside DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo
  • 0.0 (0)
  • TECHNOLOGY

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

  1. Duck Tales: Hack Days at DuckDuckGo — why we do them, and the role of trust (Ep.25)

    4 HR AGO

    Duck Tales: Hack Days at DuckDuckGo — why we do them, and the role of trust (Ep.25)

    In this episode, Gabriel (Founder) and Julia (People Operations) discuss hack days (our version of a hackathon), how we encourage participation, and some of the product changes it’s led to. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy. Gabriel: Hello everybody. Welcome to Duck Tales again. I’m Gabriel, the founder of DuckDuckGo. And with me today is Julia. Julia, do you want to introduce yourself? Julia: Yeah, I’m Julia. I am part of the PeopleOps team. Been at DuckDuckGo for three years and a half. So yeah, almost four. Very excited to be here. Gabriel: That’s cool. Yeah. It feels like a long time. I’m really bad at time. I know I’ve been working with you for a long time. You’re wearing a DuckDuckGo sweater from our... one more swag like that one. Yeah. Nice. Okay. So today we’re here to talk about hack days, which is something, it’s not exactly PeopleOps, but it’s something that you also just work on here. You’ve been responsible for it for a while. So yeah, tell us, tell us what hack days are. Julia: Yes. Gabriel: I know they’ve preceded you and I can talk about that too, but talk about your journey with hack days. Julia: Yeah. So it’s, I love actually owning hack days because it’s not as... it’s related to culture, but not so specific to HR and PeopleOps. But hack days actually, it’s also known or mostly known as hackathons. A lot of companies in the tech industry do them. It’s a combination of the word hack, meaning creative exploratory programming, and marathon, which is something that you do fairly quick and in a short amount of time. So it’s kind of about working very intensively for a short amount of time and see what you can accomplish. It became popular in the late nineties, beginning of two thousands. And we just happened to call it a little differently. So we call it hack days. At DuckDuckGo, the way that we do that is about three or four weeks throughout the year. We do our hack days. It’s from Wednesday to Friday. So from Wednesday to Friday, we allow folks to just put all their regular work duties on the side, on pause, and using good judgment, of course, and work on anything they want that relates to DuckDuckGo. So full creativity, autonomy, and collaborating with other folks and in other domains. So that’s what it is. Gabriel: Yeah, so a couple things with it. One is we, you do your largest part of this, so tell me what you think about this, but we’ve really tried to encourage people to do it too. So you don’t have to do it. I mean, that’s one thing, you can continue working your normal working day, but we’ve really tried to encourage as many people as we can to participate and also as we’ve grown to collaborate with others. With the idea being here that when you step away for those kind of three days, you know, without the constraints of like regular project scoping and oversight, and you just kind of left to like build from scratch, you can come up with and try new ideas. And especially if you collaborate and cross-pollinate, and as a result, I mean, we’ll talk about this, but a lot of good things have come about it. So we’ve been really trying to encourage people, but I think some people are kind of reluctant to do that. Worried they’re going to fall behind on their work or whatever. So yeah, so maybe you can speak to how we try to encourage people. Julia: Yeah, it’s an interesting part of... So our culture has a lot of autonomy and one of our values is to build trust. So we treat people with trust, we trust folks when they are hired, we trust our hiring process. So we know they’re going to use good judgment, they’re going to put their work on the side if they can, they’re going to keep doing the things that they have to do and balance things out. But it is interesting because as folks come from other organizations, they do have... like some folks, some people have a fear of like, no, I’m going to leave my work behind. I don’t know how this works. Like, is it going to be okay if I actually put it on hold? Thankfully, we’ve been doing it for a while and a lot of people participate. So I feel like after you’ve gone through the first one and you see how many people participate, you’re like, this is actually a big thing here. And it’s cool to do it. So we try to motivate in a way that we build our culture, just like letting people know, like we trust you. We trust you and you can make that judgment call. We’re all grownups here. We all know it’s a business. We all know what we have to do. So it’s, I think that’s the way that we motivate. We also try to ask people to plan ahead. So we remind folks when we post the whole calendar of the hack days in the beginning of the year. So folks already know when that’s going to happen and they can kind of make sure that things that are more pressing in their regular work is taken care of in advance. And we announce a couple of weeks before it happens, so folks also have that just as a reminder. So those are some of the things that we do to motivate them. And they can also, if they’re not able to do the hack days that week, they can actually make it up to hack days in another week. So if that week actually just becomes something like, you know what, now I have to actually focus on my work, I won’t be able to pause things, they can do that in another week that seems more suiting for them. Gabriel: Yeah, I was going to mention that if you didn’t, because it’s a subtle thing that we eventually did. I think another subtle one, but it’s just, it’s not even something we’ve done, but to your point, since so many people participate, is a lot of the leadership also participates. And I think, yeah, and I participate sometimes. And so when people see that, I think it may give more permission for people to do so, you know? Yeah, exactly. Julia: You participate! Yeah, that’s an example thing. Gabriel: And then on the other side of it, I know we’re gonna wrap this up, but maybe not as a good time, is like, you know, I agree, we have a good cadence now of like encouragement and lead up and stuff, but then the end of it is also kind of fun, as like kind of the end of the hack days. So what happens at the end of hack days? Julia: Well, so we do hack days for several reasons, but one of the reasons is engagement. And one of the really cool things about hack days is you have from Wednesday to Friday, for those who don’t know, every Friday at DuckDuckGo, we have an all-company meeting. So we all get together. We talk about company updates. It’s kind of like what a town hall, a traditional town hall call would look like, but with our cool twist. So for hack days weeks, we actually try to, we cancel all the other meetings and that’s the only one that stays. And during that meeting, we have a showcase specifically for hack days. So that week is just about the showcase. We allow folks to talk about what they worked on for two minutes. We actually have to time it, which is kind of, it’s one of the things that... Gabriel: We have a lot of people now. Yeah. Yeah. Julia: I do not like. I’ve been really hard not to interrupt people and to just let them do it, but we are growing as an organization, so it becomes quite challenging as we grow the amount of hack days demos that we have. But during that call, you just get to listen to everything that folks created in three days. And it’s really fascinating because you get to see, well, for me, for example, I’m not in the tech team, so it’s really interesting to see how tech folks are thinking about the product, what are they doing to make things better? And from any other domain, you just get to see how people work and how fast they can accomplish things and how, you get to know more of the products because obviously they’re demoing things. So it’s kind of a win-win even if you don’t participate because you just get to learn a bunch and you just leave that call so motivated and so inspired because you get to see we are really a big bunch of like really smart people who are overachievers. So it’s really crazy what we can achieve like in three days. And it’s just like beautiful to see and you just leave that call feeling proud and feeling inspired and then you get your own ideas from it and you get to reach out to the folks who worked on things that you found interesting and just like talk to them about your feedback on that. So that is really special and I think that is the most special and impactful part of hack days, aside from, of course, the fact that it ends up impacting our products because several things are shipped and also internal processes are improved throughout those projects. So, yeah, it’s really exciting and really beautiful to see. Gabriel: Yeah, agreed. I mean, let’s talk about that last part for a bit. So you can work on anything. We don’t even say you need to work on something that needs to ship. You know, like people can work on kind of pie in the sky ideas or little improvements they want to make. But some people do work on either internal improvements for like work process or development process or actual changes in the product that do end up shipping or spark ideas that end up shipping. And we do encourage that. I mean, so we had one, I’m just thinking of the Duck Tales episodes we did. We did one episode with, I think with Rachel, with the AI, no AI image filter that came out of hack days. Are there any others that jump out to you of like projects we did the last year or so that we ended up shipping? Julia: Oh yes. I love that one. It’s so interesting that you say that because that is one of my favorites, basically, as someone who creates some imaging myself, as someone as an artist myself, I actually really ap

    20 min
  2. Duck Tales: DuckDuckGo browser updates — custom themes and password manager (Ep.24)

    25 MAR

    Duck Tales: DuckDuckGo browser updates — custom themes and password manager (Ep.24)

    In this episode, Peter (Product), Stephen (Design) and Balint (Windows) discuss updates to our browsers, from the most popular custom themes, to why over 40% of our iOS users have made DuckDuckGo their system-wide password manager. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy. Peter: Hi, and welcome to DuckTales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, the technology, and the people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from DuckDuckGo employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, and more recently, approaches to AI as well. My name is Peter. I am on the product team at DuckDuckGo, often working on our browsers, which we’ll talk about today. And joined here today, I have my colleague Stephen. Stephen: Steven, work on the product design team. Peter: And Balint. Balint: Hey, I’m on the Windows Developer Team. Peter: Awesome, and today we’re going to talk a little bit about our browsers, as I mentioned. So many people don’t know we have browsers. They’ve come to know us through DuckDuckGo Private Search, which of course you can use in any browser. But we’ve for many years offered browsers on iOS and Android devices. And more recently, in the last few years, we’ve expanded that to Windows and Mac desktop computers as well. Our browsers are amongst the most popular in the market. For example, in the United States on iPhones, we are the most popular browser after Safari, which comes built in, and the Chrome browser, which of course many people have come to know over the years. So our browsers are used by lots of different people. When we started building our browsers and as we expanded our browsers to desktop computers, we started to prioritize the features and functionality in our browsers based on sort of two things. One, having privacy at their core. Of course, that’s our brand promise, and we want to deliver on that. But also, we wanted to make sure our browsers were easy to use replacements for the privacy invasive browsers that people have been using for many years. And so we prioritize a lot of features based on what would make it easier to use. We base it on people’s feedback, which we’ll talk about a little bit more. And often internally, we talk about focusing the features we build on the three Ds. We call that dependability, discoverability, and delight. The features should just work. It should be easy to find. And they should be delightful if we’re doing them right. So today, we’re going to talk about a couple different browser capabilities that fall into a few of these buckets that we thought would be interesting to share a little bit about. First, we’ll talk about custom theming. Stephen, do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Stephen: Yeah, custom theming to me is pretty simple. It’s where you can go into your browser and just choose which color you want to use. It can be that green or blue or purple. I think we have a range of colors to pick from. Peter: And why did we build custom theming? Stephen: Originally, we didn’t plan to. We were going to try to keep it simple and just have a light and a dark mode. But we got into it we discovered that people really like to customize their UI. It’s just like a fun way to make browsing more fun and personalized. And they really like that. And it also can help you pick your browser out from other browsers. So it’s really also a functional improvement. Peter: Do you want to give us a little bit of a demo on how that works? Stephen: So we built two ways to get into this. If you’re on the new tab screen, you can open the customized sidebar and we have a theme picker up here with a few colors. You can pick gray or blue or green, purple. Lots of people love purple. And you can also change the theme from light to dark or just to use whatever the system decides. So we support all of these. And if you want, you can also change the new tab background screen to be separate from the rest. And we’ve spent quite a bit of time making sure that this works on all surfaces. So you can see it in the settings and the bookmarks in the history and elsewhere. Also, we have a neat little feature here where you can change the app icon and the dock to match the theme. So that’s a little more continuity and a little more fun added to the feature. Peter: Stephen, were there any challenges in building this as we started to introduce it? Stephen: Yeah, so like I said, we didn’t really have themes on the roadmap when we started. So we kind of had to go back and rethink the way we were styling things and build a whole theme system so that we could apply a bunch of different themes and make sure that it was, we could have more themes in the future. So now it’s all centralized and easy to work with. So we could probably add more or maybe even enable customization at some point, user customization. Peter: And would you say, what’s the response been from our users so far? Stephen: It’s been pretty positive so far. We got a lot of feedback saying, thank you for adding this. And it’s been pretty positive and monitoring people using it. It’s going up. So that’s good. Peter: And you’re saying the certain colors were the most popular, I think you mentioned earlier. Stephen: Yeah, so I think the most popular color is, let’s see, it’s sleet blue, I think. And then the second most popular color was violet. It’s kind of neck and neck there. Personally, desert is my favorite, but it was not the most popular. Peter: Got it. Cool. Where are we going next with it? Stephen: We’re looking into adding a dark mode for web pages that don’t have it, which is going to be pretty interesting. And like I said, we may, depending on if we get more feedback on how many themes we have, how many colors we ship with by default or expand that out to letting people choose their own colors. Peter: Yeah, the dark mode for sites to use dark mode, that’s starting to roll out. We have that on mobile devices, on Android starting to roll out on iOS. And it’s something, as you said, we’re looking at on our desktop browser. So I think our users can look forward to that in the near future, which is awesome. Great. Let’s talk about password management next. Maybe Balint start with what is a password manager? Maybe people don’t realize that in their browsers they have typically password managers. Maybe just grab that at a high level first. Balint: So the password manager is the thing that comes up when you go to a login screen and the browser offers you to fill your username and password automatically. And it’s a critical piece of feature because one of the most dangerous attack vectors used to be credential stuffing where an attacker got hold of your passwords from one site. And if you have been reusing the same password on other sites, they could just brute force. They could just try the same password with your username on other sites and usually get a hit. And the password manager is a perfect defense against this sort of attack because it takes the burden of having to memorize passwords off your back. Peter: That makes sense. Yeah, I guess, you know, over the last 10 years, a lot of you hear a lot about third party password managers like 1Password or Bitwarden or LastPass and more people are using those. But I think it’s probably safe to say that most people use their browser as their password manager. Maybe they don’t even recognize that it is a password manager, but it is, as you’re describing overall. Why did we choose to sort of build it into the browser and start to build out a lot of those capabilities? Is it because that is the easiest way for people to protect themselves, as you’re describing? Balint: I think it matches perfectly well with the 3Ds that we have. So it’s a core part of dependability. You want your online experience to just work, not have to memorize passwords and not have to think about where those passwords are stored. Of course, if you explicitly want to, you can use a password manager, but it is very nice to have a secure default built right into the browser. And we take care of the whole lifecycle. So when you register to a new site, our browsers will suggest secure passwords, which are randomly generated and long enough, take care of storing them, and if you turn on sync, can get your passwords synced across your different devices so you don’t have to re-enter them on every single device you have. Peter: And we’ve had the core capabilities in our browser product for some time. What’s been the user response and maybe describe where we’re going with it next. Balint: So we see on our anonymized dashboards that uptake for these password managers is very high and we keep adding new features. For example, recently over the past months, we have shipped a feature for Android and iOS devices where you can use DuckDuckGo’s password manager as the main system password manager and you can fill passwords in other applications from the DuckDuckGo database. And uptake for that feature has been phenomenal. We have almost half. So a bit more than 40% of our iOS users enabling us as their primary system-wide password manager. We have more cool features in the works. My personal favorite is something that is called TOTP. It is that six digit number you see on certain websites, which is used as a second factor authentication. This is something that many password managers already offer, but browsers don’t really tend to. We would be one of the first on the market to ship this. And it would present a second security layer that is much harder to phish, so much harder to steal than a conventional password. Peter: And do you think we’ve hit challenges in building this along the

    14 min
  3. Duck Tales: Why DuckDuckGo is giving users a choice about if and how they use AI (Ep.23)

    18 MAR

    Duck Tales: Why DuckDuckGo is giving users a choice about if and how they use AI (Ep.23)

    In this episode, Gabriel (Founder) and Zac (SVP, Insights) discuss AI adoption, common user concerns, and why we’re building AI that users can control and customize. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy. Gabriel: Hello, welcome back to Duck Tales. I’m Gabriel, founder of DuckDuckGo. I have with me today Zac Pappis. Zac: Yep, I’m Zac. I’ve been here for about 14 years now, so I think we’ve had the pleasure of working together for a very long time. And we’re on our insights team, so generally doing a lot of market research or user research and generally trying to give us better insight into what our customers and future customers want. Gabriel: Cool, and yeah, happy to have you. And we’ve been friends for 15 years. But we are going to talk about AI today. You’ve done a lot of research in AI over the last year. And we obviously recently put out this kind of Yes AI, No AI public poll. And we’ve talked about AI a few times on the show here, just in terms of product, but also just more generally. So our approach to AI has been a bit different than the other tech companies. Obviously we’re asking people if they want AI, no one seems to ever be doing that. But more generally our approach is to make AI features that are private, of course, because we’re a privacy company, useful, which I think lots of customers have different opinions on what AI is useful and what is not useful across all sorts of products. And most importantly, I think to this discussion, optional. So we’re making all of our AI features optional. You can turn them off or tune them, actually. We’re going to get into that too. So that’s been our approach, private, useful, optional. And we thought we would talk about, with you today, who’s been actually doing a lot of research with consumers and looking at other research, kind of how those three things kind of thread through the research. So if we were gonna, you know, obviously that’s a big topic, maybe we can start at the highest level and work our way down. Like, yeah, highest level landscape of AI right now, kind of like what are you seeing in all of the research trends that you’re looking at? Zac: Yeah, I mean, generally, I think what we feel just as being consumers and people downstream of a lot of technology is that it’s been pushed on us as well as the general market, despite not really asking if we wanted it. And the market moves so fast that I think we feel the consumer has been left behind and no one really ever got an informed choice or consent into how prevalent AI has become in every product. And we think that’s a mistake, right? So for users and the companies that are building it, that choice as you laid it out is to make these things really truly useful and optional and of course, private. But that’s not what we’ve seen. And I don’t think that’s how most people have felt in terms of the ways that the companies have rolled these products into, or I should say rolled them out to their broader consumer base. Lots of tech companies have put AI overviews into products or turned AI on by default without really asking for consumer consent. It really reminds me a lot of what had happened through the 2010s and the cookie era or social logins or a lot of cases where technology just sort of appeared for people without a lot of demand for it or really a lot of cost to use it or a lack of concern into how exactly their data was going to be used or how would it impact the usefulness of the product they were using. Gabriel: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, giving them the best intentions, like, even though we kind of just screwed the approach, I think somebody saw a lot of people’s assumptions seem to be it was super useful and everyone’s going to love this. And I think to some degree it’s turned out not as useful for lots of people in different scenarios. And then some people just don’t want it shoved down their throat. You know, they would like the choice. They might use it anyway. So with that in mind, like, I know you actually — so like that’s kind of the general consumer sentiment, but like in terms of like actual adoption, like data points, where are you, what are you seeing right now? Zac: Yeah, so we see that this is everywhere. We also see that people are using it a lot. Some studies that we have looked at and run ourselves, as well as those that we’ve evaluated from external companies and polling services, or things like Pew had run a study in June of last year showing that there is a lot of variability when it comes to who is using AI and who has a strong preference for it. A good example might be that 29% of parents use AI daily, but 15% of non-parents use it. And that’s almost twice the rate from parents and non-parents that are using it. That’s just the type of disparity, I think, that we see across different consumer types. So older or younger, more educated, less educated, there is a real preference and usage gap between these groups. And that doesn’t mean that this product is going to be right or the specific implementation is going to be right for everybody. And so that level of specificity or attenuation for exactly how the product appears to people is really important to us. So despite the fact that you have lots of parents, 30% of parents using AI daily, I think even more, 50% of Americans are actually concerned, more concerned than excited about AI. And that’s gone up over the last few years. So you have these two things happening. You have a lot more exposure and usage of AI and more familiarity with it. But as people are becoming more familiar with it, their concern is going up. And that to us is evident that someone’s really living with a choice that they didn’t really get to make. Gabriel: Yeah. Well, I think one thing is usually said in there and it goes to some other data points I’ve seen very recently, correct me if I’m wrong, but there was another Pew that came out really recently on teenagers and it was about, I think about half the teenagers were kind of regular daily users. And then there was another one, just about ChatGPT usage and it was like maybe 40% of desktop people were weekly users. What I see on that is I do see that’s obviously very significant adoption in three or four years. However, that’s still like majority of people close are not daily users. You know, so like the one headline I take from what you said and what I’ve seen is that yes, there is a lot of adoption, but this idea that everyone’s using it all the time is that narrative just seems not true. And it relates to your concern points. Like the people who are using it are concerned. People who aren’t using it are also very concerned. And so there’s just like generally a building concern. There are obviously lots of different issues people have with AI. So like, how do you like think about that concern? If you kind of try to piece it apart, like, where are people expressing, how are people expressing that concern, I guess, and how is it related to their... Zac: Yeah. I think it’s something that we know pretty well because we’ve seen a similar type of concern with tech overreach before. Just some stats that we have on hand to share because I did look into this a little bit before today. There was a study by Resilience [CHECK] in December, so pretty recent, December 2025, showing 54% of those polled, US adults that they surveyed, have avoided AI-powered features. And in our own polling of US adults, we’ve seen something closer to like 13% of people actively disabling AI search or browser features in their browser to protect themselves. And when we look more deeply at why people are doing that, taking, you know, kind of these extra steps either to tune or to completely avoid the way that AI has been integrated into their products, we see a couple of, I should say, familiar concerns. There is a concern that companies are rolling these new technologies into their products so quickly that they come with new types of privacy trade-offs or data security concerns. And of course, we’ve seen that in the past with Cambridge Analytica and other cases where a lot of data collection can just increase the surface area, the risk surface area for having that data. So when asked why people were avoiding AI or were turning these features off, I think 51% had said they reduced data sharing because of AI, meaning a behavior that they’re taking to proactively not share as much as a result of AI being in the product. And when asked what they wanted, the majority of answers from those folks were opt-out rights, data traceability, and disclosure. None of those things are no AI. They’re consistent more with a theme that would be control, right? Not no AI. They just want to know when it’s being used, how it’s being used, and to have some input and flexibility into where it’s applied to the product. Gabriel: Yeah, I mean, those seem like totally legitimate concerns to us. I think more broadly, like what I’m hearing is, I mean, that’s, privacy is one of the main concerns people have. That’s obviously why we’re building private AI and giving people that control. The second is that people do want options to your point. It’s not just yes or no. It’s, like, yes, some people, but it’s a smaller percentage like you pointed out, totally want to get rid of all AI because maybe they have more objections for various reasons. But it seems like the majority of people actually just want it to be useful and private. So what’s useful to somebody may not be useful to another person. And so if there are 10 AI features, maybe they want to engage with six out of 10. Maybe they want to turn the dials on them a little bit different. And so it’s like this br

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

    11 MAR

    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

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

    4 MAR

    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

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

    25 FEB

    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

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

    18 FEB

    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

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

    11 FEB

    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

    24 min
See All (25)

About

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

Information

  • Creator
    DuckDuckGo
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    25
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © DuckDuckGo
  • Show Website
    Inside DuckDuckGo

You Might Also Like