PCWorld reports that DuckDuckGo's recent poll revealed 90% of respondents prefer searching without AI integration, highlighting growing user resistance to AI-powered search features.

DuckDuckGo is now expanding its paid subscription with access to several of the most advanced AI models on the market. Subscribers can now access OpenAI's GPT-4o and GPT-5, Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4, and Meta's Llama Maverick via the Duck.ai To protect privacy, Duck.ai hides the user's IP address from the AI model providers, and chat logs are saved locally and aren't used to train the AI models. In addition, there's a special "Fire Button" that lets users instantly delete previous conversations and chat histories. The price of the subscription remains unchanged at 9.99/month or 99/year.

Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has launched a new search filter that allows users to prevent AI-generated images being shown in image searches. The feature was added after users complained that AI images make it harder to find relevant results. The setting can be found under the "Images" tab, where a new option called "AI images" lets users choose to show or hide AI content. The filter is based on open block lists, such as uBlock Origin and Huge AI Blocklist. Because of this, the filtering isn't comprehensive--some AI-generated images may still make it through in search results.

Search engines play a crucial role in shaping public discourse by influencing how information is accessed and framed. While prior research has extensively examined various dimensions of search bias -- such as content prioritization, indexical bias, political polarization, and sources of bias -- an important question remains underexplored: how do search engines and ideologically-motivated user queries contribute to bias in search results. This study analyzes the outputs of major search engines using a dataset of political and social topics. The findings reveal that search engines not only prioritize content in ways that reflect underlying biases but also that ideologically-driven user queries exacerbate these biases, resulting in the amplification of specific narratives. Moreover, significant differences were observed across search engines in terms of the sources they prioritize. These results suggest that search engines may play a pivotal role in shaping public perceptions by reinforcing ideological divides, thereby contributing to the broader issue of information polarization.

I've been trying to disentangle my online life from Google for a while. And as someone who wrote about Android professionally for years, it hasn't been easy. I've ditched Chrome, but I still use a Samsung Galaxy phone and Google Pixel Watch, for example. But when I finally got off the big daddy, Google Search, and switched to DuckDuckGo, it had a surprising effect: Google got better. That's a broad statement, so let me be more particular right away.

This paper develops an agent-based automated fact-checking approach for detecting misinformation. We demonstrate that combining a powerful LLM agent, which does not have access to the internet for searches, with an online web search agent yields better results than when each tool is used independently. Our approach is robust across multiple models, outperforming alternatives and increasing the macro F1 of misinformation detection by as much as 20 percent compared to LLMs without search. We also conduct extensive analyses on the sources our system leverages and their biases, decisions in the construction of the system like the search tool and the knowledge base, the type of evidence needed and its impact on the results, and other parts of the overall process. By combining strong performance with in-depth understanding, we hope to provide building blocks for future search-enabled misinformation mitigation systems.

This one, called AI Chat, comes courtesy of DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine that obviously doesn't want to feel left behind in the AI arms race. The company has been testing AI Chat over the last few months, but as of today, it's available to everyone. Unlike other standalone bots like Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT that are powered by their own large language models, DuckDuckGo's AI Chat is not. Instead, think of it as a way to access multiple chatbots in a single place. Right now, AI chat will let you choose between OpenAI's GPT 3.5, Anthropic's Claude 3 Haiku, Meta's Llama 3 and Mistral's Mistral 8x7B, and the company says that more models are coming soon.

A major outage struck Bing.com, Microsoft's search engine, early Thursday with the problem apparently spreading to the brand's application programming interface which means that services such as DuckDuckGo also went down. According to reports the outage also impacts ChatGPT and Ecosia. Despite Google's dominance in the world of web searching, Bing's API has numerous high profile clients. DuckDuckGo issued a brief statement on X. Users were greeted with an error page featuring a panda on Bing.com with the message: 'It's not you, it's us.' 'Announcement: We're currently experiencing an issue with DuckDuckGo Search that might prevent you from getting results.

Microsoft Corp. has threatened to cut off access to its internet-search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they don't stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence chat products, according to people familiar with the dispute. The software maker licenses the data in its Bing search index - a map of the internet that can be quickly scanned in real time - to other companies that offer web search, such as Apollo Global Management Inc.'s Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. In February, Microsoft integrated a cousin of ChatGPT, OpenAI's AI-powered chat technology, into Bing. Rivals quickly moved to roll out their own AI chatbots as hype built around the buzzy technology. This week, Alphabet Inc.'s Google publicly released Bard, its conversational AI product.

Everyone wants in on AI these days, and for good reason. AI programs and services are pulling in millions of active users and dominating headlines. ChatGPT alone reached 100 million active users within two months. The latest players in the AI space are search engines, which want to transform traditional "googling" into educational conversations with artificial intelligence. DuckDuckGo is taking a slightly different approach, incorporating AI into search without the chat--instead, offering users clear, concise answers to their queries.