Episode Details

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim RaybouldMm-hmm. Well, I don't know how far back you want to pull the curtain. Your intro said you were pulling the—OK, well, I mean, the SERP is written in, largely written in Perl. Perl has a—it is challenging to stream the response back in Perl. So when you use an AI tool like DuckAI, our chatbot tool, the response will stream back, which means that every single set of words, it doesn't wait until the end of its response to give it to you. It gives you the response as it's going. And it's a much faster experience for users because they can start to read it as the AI is generating word after word after word. That's called streaming. In SearchAssist, we don't need to stream that concise response. We wait until it's done. We run some safety checks on