Inside DuckDuckGo

In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Chris (Partnerships) discuss the DuckDuckGo Subscription: the core protections, private AI, and how the new Pro-tier serves AI power users.
If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.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.
Beah: Hello and welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo to discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In this episode, you are going to hear about our Pro subscription plan. And my guest today is Chris Calvi. Chris, do you wanna briefly introduce yourself before we jump in?
Chris: I— I would love to. Thank you for having me back. I was on— a quick ad for people who have not listened to the original subscription overview Duck Tales episode. Gabriel and I did that six months— I don’t know, actually probably nine months ago at this point. So go find that. But I’m coming to you from sunny New Jersey. And I’m a member of the partnerships team here at DuckDuckGo. And I’ve been at DuckDuckGo for about five years. I love it here. And most recently helped run efforts to add this new Pro plan to the subscription, which we’ll be talking about on this episode.
Beah: Nice. I’d like to think of this episode as the Pro edition of the previous podcast episode that you recorded with Gabriel.
Chris: Okay, that’s fair enough.
Beah: Just to set the bar.
Chris: Yeah.
Beah: All right, and I’m Beah, I’m on the product team, if this is your first time meeting me. And yeah, I think we can kind of jump in. Like, let’s start with— can you just explain, Chris, what even is the subscription, what we’re talking about?
Chris: Yeah, and I always like to start with, like, why the subscription first, and then I’ll say what the subscription is. So the why: you know, DuckDuckGo has a ton of fully featured, excellent, free-to-use, no-login-required functionality. And we’ve had that for, like, what, fifth— 17 years? How— how long has DuckDuckGo been on? We’ve had it for a very long time. And— and so we, though, realize that there are— there’s extra functionality and features and protections that we would like to offer to— to our users, that you can’t offer— either can offer free, for free, because they have a material c—, like, a substantial cost to us, or it can’t be, like, ad-supported like the search. So— so two years, a little over two years ago, we launched the DuckDuckGo subscription. And— and that includes four protections— that are aligned with what I just mentioned, things that we sort of, like, can offer for free. And so there’s the identity theft restoration, which internally we call IDTR. And that is essentially, if you—
Beah: Not me. I call it identity theft restoration because I try to avoid—
Chris: You— you don’t like to use acronyms.
Beah: I’m anti-acronym, yes.
Chris: As a culture, we typically are. Though I like to break the rules. I break the rules.
Beah: I continue.
Chris: So in the event that your identity is ever— is ever compromised, your n—, your identity stolen and is used, for instance, to open up another credit card— for— that’s not— that you didn’t open, we have a phone number that you can dial into. Actually, let me share my screen and I can show you what I’m talking about.
Beah: You can do a live demo of calling a phone number and see what happens. Just don’t do that.
Chris: That would be risky. No, I’m just kidding. It would be good, but it would also be boring. So let me know— does this work? Do you see?
Beah: I see.
Chris: All right, so to get here— after— this is kind of like jumping ahead, but let’s say you have a subscription to DuckDuckGo already, you would log in, you’d— you’d come to your— if you have the app installed, you’d come in and you would select DuckDuckGo subscription. And in subscription settings, if you didn’t already have this device connected to your subscription, you would have to do that as a first step. But once it’s connected, then you have it and you can just come in here and go to the element of the subscription that you want. So let me walk you through those pieces of the subscription. The first one I was mentioning was identity theft restoration. And so what you would do is— in this example I mentioned where somebody opened a credit card in your name, and you’d want to re—, you wanna deal with that, you’d come in here and you would call our— this has some information for you about how it’s gonna go. You will click “talk to an advisor” and then you would make a simple phone call and they would help you make things right with your— your credit card companies, your banks, your credit bureaus, things like that. So that’s identity theft restoration. The— the subscription, as I mentioned, has four key pieces of functionality— we call it four protections in one. The second one is personal information removal. So this would also be available from your— your settings screen. You’d click on here and you’d click “open personal information removal.” And similar to the identity theft restoration, this would bring you to a page where it shows you what— what it’s going to do, what it is and how it’s going to help you and how you get started. And what personal information removal is: in the US, we have this insidious issue where data brokers essentially aggregate personal information about you, about everyone in the country, and they put it on the internet or they— they’ll sell it. Sorry, they’ll put part of it on— on the public web and then sell part of it. And this includes things like your name, your address, your phone number, your date of birth. And even relatives, like— that, like, lived in the household with you. I’m sure you’ve probably seen this if you’ve ever searched for yourself. And so with personal information removal, we go through and we opt you out of the listings on over 60 of those sites. And we’re adding more all the time. And so you would just come in here, you’d click “get started,” and this would ask you a few things, a few pieces of information which stays on your device and does not go to our servers. That’s important to mention here. And then goes through a process that’s run locally from your machine and takes some time. It takes, like, anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks or longer to get you fully removed from all of these sites. So some of the sites can act quicker than others, but this will go through and— and opt you out from being listed on those data broker websites. The— the— and interrupt me with any questions you have about this, any of these functionality, but we went through—
Beah: No, this is good, this good.
Chris: We went through the identity theft restoration, the second one being personal information removal, and then the third one is the VPN. And the VPN is— stands for, since we don’t like acronyms, virtual private network. And what it— yeah.
Beah: I guess I do allow VPN. I’m gonna allow it.
Chris: I mean, but— what it— what a VPN is, is it— is it, we set up a— anonymous secure server, and we have them in 30, or over 30, countries around the world. So wherever you’re at, you can connect to the closest one. And— and what it will do is securely— it encrypts your traffic and securely and privately tunnels it through these anonymous servers and then out to the resource that you’re requesting on the other end on the internet. So, like, all of your internet traffic is basically being tunneled through this— this private secure server and then out the other end. And so this— why— what, like, what this does is it protects you in— in— in two— two, like, key ways. One is your ISP, the internet service provider that you’re connected to, won’t be able to see the sites that you are accessing, like what sites you’re visiting. And that helps you because they’re not then able to— either it makes it more difficult for them to censor the content that you can access, and/or build an ad profile about you, for like an advertising profile, and then like resell that, for instance.
Beah: Okay.
Chris: And then on the other end, it— it protects you— the sites that you are visiting, they’re going to see the IP address, like, kind of like who you are, of the server. And so they don’t actually know who you are unless you were to, like, log in, for instance. So it gives you protection from both— in b—, on both of those cases. But, like, the— the— the use case that is, like, most common for— for the VPN, and I should have switched over to showing you this, is the— is when you’re at, like, a public Wi-Fi location, in an airport or a hotel or, like, a— a coffee shop, you don’t need those— you don’t need them seeing what websites you’re accessing. So VPN gives you that extra security. And I— as I had mentioned, you can change the location that you’re— the server, where the server is. I just keep it on “nearest location” and I’m on it right now. I keep it on all day. I use it all the time. And so I think that’s, like, the key thing about VPNs. I don’t know if the— if I did that justice.
Beah: You did. You’re doing such a good— I hate to rush you along, because you’re doing such a good job of explaining these features, but we have to get to the Pro plan. So I think you’re kind of getting to here.
Chris: The key thing. Okay, so let me just get you— yes, let me get you that last thing. So the—
Beah: Yes.
Chris: So the fourth feature is Duck.ai. And Duck.ai is free. But if you want higher limits and be able to do more on it, then— if you have a subscription, then you get higher limits, and that’s the fourth piece of functionality in the subscription. So there you go. That’s our subscription, those four things.
Beah: And explain the Pro plan versus the basic subscription versus free with regard to Duck.ai.
Chris: Okay, so free is— we don’t— we technically don’t ha—
Beah: And do you want to?
Chris: We call it a free plan. It’s not a free plan. It’s not, like, a tier in itself. DuckDuckGo— yeah, I should turn off— I could turn on— stop sharing.
Beah: Yeah.
Chris: So, okay, are we back?
Beah: I’m right back.
Chris: All right, so the— the f— DuckDuckGo, I mentioned before, it’s like everything is free on there until you get a subscription. So there’s— there isn’t really a free plan. You don’t log in. And then the— the— with the sub—, with the Plus tier, or the Plus plan, of our subscription— that was— that includes all of the functionality that I just mentioned. And— and then any— it— with Duck.ai you get increased limits over— and new models compared to what you would get on our— if you were just— just went to Duck.ai and didn’t have a— a subscription with us. The—
Beah: So when you say new models, you mean, like, basically fancier models that are more expensive to run.
Chris: Correct, yes, yeah, that’s exactly right. So just more capable, more f— more advanced models. And— and then the Pro— the Pro plan of our subscription is our newest plan. It just launched two months ago and is— is very much AI-oriented. It is a— it’s for the AI power user. And so for those who are using Duck.ai and want even more capabilities than you can get in the Plus plan, and higher limits to be able to be doing more work in there, then that’s— the Pro plan is for them. And so it includes everything in the Plus plan, but higher limits on AI and a—
Beah: But wait, there’s more.
Chris: —a Pro-exclusive model, which is Claude Opus, and better— like, better reasoning effort you can also enable in there, for when you need to— to kind of, like, go deeper on something. And I should mention the Plus— Plus plan is $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year. And the Pro plan is— is double that. So $19.99 a month or $199.99 a year.
Beah: Yeah, nice. Well, I am a daily user of our Pro plan features. I use Claude Opus via Duck.ai, I think, daily. So I can vouch for it. Well worth it. Can you tell me, Chris, were there any particular challenges with building the Pro plan?
Chris: Yeah, I mean, it was— like, kind— was like we started this in late fall, I would say, is when we started— the idea had been there, but in— in, like, mid-late fall is when we started actively working on this. And it was like adding a new floor to your home. So we— like, the home was built to be one way, and then we were like, well, we actually need to do this too. So kind of— just there was, like, the technical nuances of having that, right? This, like, all of the— every app version that we have, whether you’re using a mobile— you know, if you’re using iOS or Android or your desktop DuckDuckGo apps, all of them had to be updated to be able to recognize these new sub— the new subscription tier, and also to be able to help you get signed up to that, or to upgrade to that if you’re on the existing Plus plan and wanted to jump up to Pro. So I think that was sort of, like, the main challenge. But the— kind of the— to be more specific, the one— the one challenge that— is may surprise people f— is the— the actual subscrip— subscription flow— signing up or upgrading— is— is— is— was the biggest, I think, challenge. Because it’s— the subscription’s in 30— it’s in 30 countries. So we have to account for all of that. We have to account from where you’re coming from when you sign up, so that we can understand which features make sense for you to see, and, like, the— because we want it to— everything, all in this process, we want to be simple. And then adding that sort of second— second plan makes it complicated. You know, you want to be— be able to— to— to be clear to people: these are the things you’re going to get in each plan. And so you have to be very careful there when you’re— when you’re modifying things like that.
Beah: Yeah, you’re going from a “buy or not buy” decision to a “don’t buy, buy, which kind of buy” decision. And that’s going to vary a little bit— what you’re getting is going to vary a little bit by country— and me trying to be simultaneously transparent, extremely transparent, about all of these details and not overwhelm users with details they can’t absorb. Is that fair? Yeah.
Chris: Exactly. Yeah.
Beah: Okay, how about— were there surprises for you, like, after we’ve been live with the program for a couple months now? Like, any interesting feedback?
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that the, like, biggest— there’s— there’s really two surprises. One is the pace of adoption of this— of this plan, the Pro plan, is much faster and gr— is growing quicker than I expected. And— and so that’s, like, on the— the plus side, the good news. On the other end—
Beah: Or on the Pro side.
Chris: On the Pro— the Pro, yes, to continue that— the Pro side. And then on the— I think, in terms of, like, the constructive feedback side of things— we launched this, and, you know, like, right out the gate when we launched this two months ago, you’d just— like, has been an issue before, I think— if you hit your limits, you would sort of hit a limit for your day and you’d be like, “no, like, I didn’t get any warnings, I didn’t get any, like, educational, what this means.” And so we received fair feedback on that. And so we’ve worked to remedy that. There’s now a usage— for, like, a progress bar in your settings when you have a subscription. So you can go in there and you can see, like, where you’re at compared to your limits. And we have also added some more proactive notifications. So it doesn’t just wait till the end, it gives you a few sort of, like, heads-up, like, you— you might want to consider switching to a— to another model that won’t home your— your budget as quickly. And so that’s— that’s kind of the area where we are spending a good amount of time at the moment, and trying to improve that, and how to be more— you know, it’s going back to the simplified thing, like how to be more simple and transparent with people about when they make decisions, like which models are good for everyday use and which you should be more using— more sparingly— when you really need that extra effort.
Beah: Yeah, yeah, like, limits are annoying on any plan. But if you’re— if you hit a limit and you’re, like, deep into a conversation and you just, like, lose all that context, that’s frustrating for anybody. But if you’re, like, paying for this thing, it’s like, that’s a new level of—
Chris: Yes.
Beah: —right? Like, your expectations are different.
Chris: Very ac— very astute point. And— and I— I think that, to be clear, we are— we are doing more there too. There’s some stuff that— hopefully— I’m not sure when this is gonna— when this is gonna air, but— but maybe by then there’ll ev— there’ll be even additional things that we’ve done to really improve the experience so that people don’t have those issues anymore.
Beah: That’s a good segue. Is there anything that you can share that’s upcoming for Pro that people have to look forward to?
Chris: Well, we are— across, like, both t— both plans, we are always looking to consider what new functionality should we be including there. Does it make sense? And, you know, I— in the— in the— for the Pro plan, I think the big thing at the min— at the moment are the— around limits, right? Around how we can just be— be— peep— make people’s workflow a little more efficient so that they don’t hit these stops, or they, you know, they can just work around them. So that’s— that’s kind of— I think that’s, in the short term, some of the stuff that we’ve got coming.
Beah: Gotcha. What if you are interested in all this but you do not know if Pro tier is for you? Can you try it for free?
Chris: Yes, so both the Plus and the Pro plan have a seven-day free trial, if you have not already used a trial. So if you’ve, like, tried Plus— the Plus prep plan already— and you want to try Pro, you’ll have to buy it for a month to just try it. Or if you— if you’re new, you can try either one for— for seven days for free.
Beah: Nice. Where does somebody go if they want to do that?
Chris: Yes, so you can go to duckduckgo.com/subscribe and you can see more details on everything I talked about today and— and sign up for a trial on either of those plans. But hopefully you’ll give Pro— Pro plan a— a try.
Beah: Yeah, I recommend it. Okay. Before we close, Chris, I want to ask you— this is an experiment. Haven’t done this before at the end of the Duck Tales episode, but we’re going to do it. You know how it’s, like, a popular thing at the end of podcast interviews to do a lightning round, like, fire off some quick questions? I have three questions for you.
Chris: Okay.
Beah: You get— you have to answer. My rule is going to be five words max. Can you it?
Chris: That’s gonna be challenge.
Beah: Okay. Let’s try it. Let’s see what happens. All right. What— model— we’ve been talking about model choice and Pro unlocking new models. What model do you personally use the most in your life, Chris?
Chris: I use Sonnet the most, and then I move— move up— this is really exceeding five words— but I move up to Opus as needed. So, like—
Beah: Okay.
Chris: —usually, like, at least once a day I’ll jump to Opus.
Beah: Sonnet, Opus as needed. I’m giving it to you.
Chris: There you go. Thank you. Yes.
Beah: It’s like a training cycle for the next question.
Chris: Yeah. We’ll see— yeah, let’s see if I can do this.
Beah: What was the location of your last functional team meetup? So, Chris, you mentioned you were on the partnerships team. We do— for those who don’t know, we do meetups where everybody gets together in a given location with their functional team. Also do that company-wide. Where was the last location of your partnership team meetup?
Chris: Rome, Italy.
Beah: Very good, very good. Okay,
Chris: Ha ha.
Beah: —this last one might stump you, but let’s try it. If you were Dax the Duck— Duck, Duck, Duck, DuckDuckGo’s mascot— what color bow tie would you wear?
Chris: Blue.
Beah: Okay, down to one word. You went from, like, 12 to four to three, I can’t remember, to one. It’s very good.
Chris: There is a— there is a, like, Haiku joke to be made here, ‘cause Haiku’s a model, but I’m not gonna— I’m not going—
Beah: That’s a very good audience.
Chris: —there.
Beah: I think you just did. You just nailed it. All right, well, thank you, Chris, so much for joining Duck Tales and talking about the Pro plan. And listeners, I hope you give it a try if you haven’t already. And yeah, see you around.
Chris: Thanks for having me.
Beah: All right, bye.
Chris: Bye.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com

In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Mihai (Design) discuss how the Duck.ai team prioritizes what to build, how we use research and user feedback, and a demo of recent UX updates.
If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.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.
Beah: Hello, and welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering approach. And in this particular episode, you’re going to hear from Mihai, who is here to talk about the various UX improvements that we’ve made to Duck.ai recently. Mihai is on the design team. And do you want to just give your give a quick introduction of yourself, Mihai?
Mihai: Sure, thank thanks for having me. My name is Mihai. Originally from Moldova, lived across the world in many places, now based in Switzerland, joined DuckDuckGo maybe around three years ago, and I’ve been on the Duck.ai team almost from the very beginning, so I’ve seen the product evolve since then dramatically. So so yeah, we’ll talk about it today.
Beah: Nice. Well thanks for joining. For anyone who hasn’t met me, I’m Beah. I’m on the product team here. I’ve been around for a while. So yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and ask Mihai some questions about his work on Duck.ai and we’ll just dive on in. So I think I said we’re talking about improving Duck.ai UX, and I’m not sure I said that if you’re not familiar, UX is just a fancy abbreviation for user experience, even though we all know experience doesn’t start with an X. So this means like, you know, making the features that we have and the functionality that we have more usable, tweaking the functionality to better like suit people’s needs and desires, and just make the product more delightful and easier to use. You feel free to amend that definition. But just to kind of like set
Mihai: Feel free to amend definition.
Beah: the set the tone a little bit, Mihai, tell me a little bit about like how we even decide to work on something. Like how do we prioritize UX user experience changes in Duck.ai land?
Mihai: Yeah, as designers, we’re basically I I tend to think of myself as the diplomats that we we try to talk to as many people to get our work done. But we use various signals to inform these decisions. Some of some of them are more perfect, some of them are imperfect. There’s no There’s no reality where we’re working with perfect information. So sometimes we form assumptions, sometimes we rely on research. User feedback, internal feedback. Sometimes we have strategic bets that we place as an organization. We have dashboards with metrics. We have just no we know the competitive gaps that we have, and sometimes we just rely on instinct. So we
Beah: That’s good.
Mihai: we bundle all of these together in our decision-making process. Some of these signals they surface a problem,
Beah: Yeah.
Mihai: others validate the direction and it’s on us to use our own human judgment to determine the right trade-off for for these things. And in the end it narrows down to to looking at where the biggest overlap is with the user problems that we have and where we’re taking the product.
Beah: Yeah, or do all the hand and just then follow it.
Mihai: Yeah, maybe this is more kind of like general response, but no one decision was the same.
Beah: Yeah, right once. Yeah, yeah.
Mihai: So it’s it’s it’s all based on experienced people in the room making the the calls based on the information that we have.
Beah: Yeah, I mean one thing that I’m guessing people I I bet a lot of people would underestimate the degree to which we’re obsessed with user feedback. Like you can’t completely rely on user feedback to tell you how to build a product because, you know, hopefully the people building the product have additional insights about what’s possible and what good looks like that users can’t articulate or shouldn’t take the time to articulate. It’s not on them. But that aside, like we obsess pretty hard on feedback. Like we read an insane amount of feedback. We have systems for categorizing it and making sense of it. I mean, I’ve been caught up in like long discussions where we are really deeply trying to interpret a comment somebody made on Reddit or in the app store and like try to figure out the best way to address it. And so I’m just pointing that out because I think that might not be obvious. Like I think there’s probably a lot of, you know, for a tech company that serves millions and millions of users, I’m not sure that’s I’m guessing that’s not the norm. So that is a big part of it. But then like beyond that, you know, there’s a bunch of other signals we use, like Mihai said, and I know in Duck.ai on that team, like you guys have a rubric, right, that you’re using to actually like evaluate in a structured way a bunch of project ideas and feedback is one of the inputs to that rubric, but there are others as well. So also very maybe distinctive of DuckDuckGo is I think it’s a hyper structured and rational decision making process. Would you agree with that, Mihai?
Mihai: Yeah. It’s it’s quite unique and I think the the great thing is that a bunch of us, everyone here, they’re scoping their own projects, they have their own ideas, they uncover different things that they’re pitching in and that goes into that rubric. And at certain times we those categories of how how we score the rubric, they’re weighted. So sometimes certain elements are more important than the others. And that help us kind of look at what what’s important to us right now and what we’re getting from the users and all the projects that are strong candidates for us to tackle tackle in the next roadmap, for example.
Beah: Cool. Yeah, so let’s talk about something that did bubble to the top recently. Like, can you give me an example of an a UX improvement that you’ve worked on?
Mihai: Yes, so the first example is dictation. I’ll share my screen real quick. Cool, so this is our interface here. So users keep asking for dictation features, so it’s this microphone in the input field. There’s certain people that for them is they would use the input field. They’ll rather talk than type. It’s either a prompt is really long, or you they just want to do it hands free. And shipping this was actually great because it it got us in line with the competitors as well. But internally we we were kind of i it it was the group was split in terms of like if we wanna do it until that user feedback kept coming back, kept coming back. And we decided to to pull the trigger. For from the UX standpoint, what was exciting for me personally is voice interfaces, they have a big affordance problem. That it’s really hard sometimes to know what’s the system status for that and to avoid the jargon is basically you need to know what the what the app is doing at any point in time. And that was an interesting challenge on top of just delivering the feature. And if I if I trigger it, we we do three things here. We label things clearly for people to know what’s going on. You also get a visual cue, this waveform that provides feedback, and as you see me pause, that waveform reacts to my voice, but also the input field has changed its its shape not the height or anything but what’s inside it now is geared toward towards a different input which is not text and we’ve added this nice glow animation to it which is which is really cool so and then it’s trust transcribing and giving back the the text. Another one should should I should I give a few more? Alright.
Beah: Nice.
Beah: Yeah, yeah. Give me another example, please. That’s good.
Mihai: Alright. Another one is batch deletion, which is another feature that was requested by by users. This one is a little different because our we’re famous for our fire button. You you can basically burn all your data and stuff like that. But in Duck.ai specifically we had the reality that you could either delete one chat at a time or all of them. And nothing nothing in between. And we we decided to that we need to give people more precise control. To do it in just one step. Whenever you have 30 chats, for example, and you just want to delete seven at a time, it’s quite annoying to go one by one. So this one, it’s not groundbreaking or anything. It’s been a pattern on the web for quite some time. How you can batch select the different things. This is a great example, thinking back to the signals that we spoke. It’s a great example when you need to know where to follow the process for something when whenever you’re designing something that’s more unknown and whenever you need to trust your instincts more. And this is a project that was basically that where we we used our experience more and the project was short this was delivered and and shipped quite quickly because of that. And what the feature does you can go in and select many chats you want to delete. We have different entry points to how to do it. Usually
Beah: Yeah.
Mihai: we know people click the fire button to open it so we surface a button there for people to actually not delete everything but select multiple ones or for maybe power users whenever something’s selected you can shift click and enter this mode and delete delete your chats. So yeah, this one the reason I’m I’m asking is we spoke about all these signals and how complex things are, but this one was th three designers, we got in the room, we did a thirty minute thing, then I spent maybe two hours on it on edge cases, we put it to review to a wider group of stakeholders and it went straight into implementation, which is which is great because we have features that are a little bit more complex which require all all of that
Beah: That’ll be true.
Mihai: kind of digging, research and all those other things. But this is a great outlier maybe where we
Beah: Yeah.
Mihai: can just roll with differently a little bit.
Beah: Yeah, yeah. Also, there’s yeah, I j while you were talking, I was thinking about we ha we also added not too long ago another another way to delete chat level sort of at your cadence, which is like when you hover do you wanna show your screen again real quick, Mihai? When you hover over each chat in your chat history, you get a fire button. So you can also just tap that. So if you want to do one at a time, but you know, from a list, that’s another way to do it. I think that was a nice win. And then I don’t know, just for a little like real time inside baseball, well, truly an hour ago, Mihai and I were on a a thread where we were talking about with some other folks whether what the equivalent best equivalent of that on mobile is where you don’t have hover, you know. So we just have to if we want I I personally love and use those that per chat fire button. You’re like, I don’t need that, I don’t need that, I’m gonna clean it up real quick. On mobile we don’t have that. So yeah, like is it worth the real estate to just always show the fire button? Is that too noisy or people gonna misclick it? So we were kind of debating that this morning and gonna get it into an internal build and like kind of feel it out ourselves and then you know if it feels good we’ll we’ll release it. But we’ll watch any feedback coming in as well to help guide us on whether it’s working as we we hoped it would. So hot off the process. Alright, do you wanna do you wanna talk about one more we talked about maybe the the model picker might be interesting to show ‘cause that was a nice and nuanced recent UX improvement.
Mihai: Yes, yeah, let me share my screen again. Yeah, this one this one is not the one I designed, so I don’t want to upset the designer who actually done the hard work. But
Beah: Mm-hmm.
Mihai: I I advised this project so I stayed close to it. So I’ll it’s it’s Esteban. So thank you Esteban for
Beah: You wanna give him a you wanna name drop? Give him a shout out.
Mihai: a better model thinker. We’re all grateful for for that. Yes, it’s basically our our team has grown, so it’s it’s great that we we can cover more ground. And Esteban is not new on the team, but whenever whenever I started it was just me. So it’s great to see all of these things basically. Ship and all these amazing features that We can put out much faster. Now this one is basically speaking of old stuff, the old mode model picker had a whole lot more details in in in it, and through research we’ve uncovered that people just could not understand what’s in there. And they were stalling, trying to make sense of it a little bit. Power users have no problem, but I don’t know like general public, people who are actually not experts on just just want to use the tool. It it was a thing that was giving them pause. An another thing that we’ve uncovered which was useful insight is once they got past that confusion, they really valued it and it was the thing that they would recommend
Beah: Yeah.
Mihai: to friends and stuff. And on top of it we also as a company, Duck.ai specifically, we provide all these L LMs from different providers. So this is Some sort of a our own differentiator where you get the private versions of all of these. So we wanted to fix this old problem of people stalling and being a little bit confused about it. And the solution was basically again based on insights, we we realized that much people knew what they wanted to use or had some general idea and they they
Beah: Again, you know, I we like that people looking on a TV.
Mihai: just use what’s giving them a good response. They just stick to it and majority don’t really switch. There are use cases for some that that switch for different particular reasons, but for this particular model or now a drop-down they just needed something much simpler and the job of this is to show that there is choice because we provide all of these things, variety, but also we wanted to remove the guesswork for for people. So
Beah: And then you’re going to
Mihai: Esteban has done an amazing job of condensing this into showing that variety. But we switched what we are doing here to for the user is we’re providing now a recommendation of what we think and what we think that they’ll use to have a great time and a great experience on on the platform. For each subscription tier we have Free, Plus and Pro. We recommend two models, one always good for everyday use. Based on their tier and another one which will give even a maybe a stronger, more comprehensive response, but will use more limits or it’ll it’ll exhaust those limits faster basically. So yeah now it’s kind of it’s much simpler and much more enjoyable at least for for for me and
Beah: Yeah. I mean
Mihai: based on your the research for users to use.
Beah: Yeah, one detail is like before it was a button that you pressed and it opened a modal. Like this it opened a new screen effectively with the with your choices and then you select your choice and then click start new chat. And like even just it’s a small thing, but like the the difference between what feels like kind of a drop down and something that feels like a new screen where you have to pick and then say start new chat, like I I I knew how it worked, and it’s not like one click takes so so much time, but the sort of like cognitive friction of like picking and then and then clicking something again, like start new chat, and like usually I hadn’t even started a chat. Like it just it didn’t feel easy peasy to switch around, you know? It felt like higher friction than you needed to so like you everything else is that even just kind of moving that like changing the UX pattern, I think is a nice, a nice little win. Sweet. But that’s one that probably is like counter to your batch delete example. Like we really did kind of agonize over a bunch of nuances because like with any design decision there’s trade-offs and there’s different cases that you have to account for in different states and like it did it took a while to to reason through it all. Speaking of which, can you give me, Mihai, an example of like a difficult or non-obvious design decision that you’ve had to make recently?
Mihai: A recent one. We always I think as a designer here I o I’m always reminded of how little we know about our user in comparison
Beah: Yes.
Mihai: to everything else we’ve experienced. I remember like we just don’t know the count of how many users we have just because we don’t track them. And stuff like that. Everything is very much on those guesstimates and kind of like I’m people sometimes use phrases like I’m confident in this assumption, like eighty percent and stuff like that. They give a percentage and it’s it’s a wonderful constraint because it’s it’s why I joined. I’ve recently so
Beah: Because it just to like because it’s privacy respecting is what you’re getting at. Yeah, we don’t track.
Mihai: Yeah. Exactly. So and and that goes with everything we touch whenever we’re designing it. It’s you you design something and it then then it’s through that lens of of respecting the the data and and providing a a great experience without needing all of those other things which other companies do. And I maybe don’t have a very good example to give that is recent one that is maybe an older one is whenever you’re getting a response how you’re switching through different models which is something Which is currently being worked on and where you will be evolving that feature soon. But that one, what wasn’t too obvious about it is that switching models is not a new paradigm in user’s mind because this AI thing is somewhat new. That’s why it takes the shape of a chat interface because it’s familiar. And switching a model in other places we’ve seen very much is has different pagination approaches and stuff like that, which is now learned but not natural based on what we’ve uncovered. And every time when I spoke to people, like I’ve seen so many confused face faces about like the pagination of answers and stuff like that. And what
Beah: Button on the natural work is everything natural.
Mihai: What we did, which wasn’t obvious obvious, we basically w took a more linear approach to how those responses are getting surfaced, which feels more natural into a chat interface, a thing that we’ve been using for decades. So
Beah: The patterns are a thing that we have.
Mihai: we kind of went against the grain there. And it wasn’t obvious at first.
Beah: So what would a paginated response look like? Like if we went that route, we would have like what, opened a whole new chat or something?
Mihai: It it no it it creates the same response but it gives you like a counter, like a page for the responses and then you paginate and it gets forked in different streams, almost like a decision tree that you can paginate back and continue conversation in different so that that
Beah: Yeah.
Mihai: even like I spoke to engineers who use AI, like they use Cursor, they use all these like advanced tools. And for some it wasn’t apparent that to to some that this feature worked that s certain way. So even at advanced people who are used to these tools were a little confused by the conventional norms, so to speak. So it made me feel really proud a little a little bit because we kind of took a different approach. And I think we get more than 300K uses on week from that switcher, which which is cool to see.
Beah: And three... coming.
Beah: Nice. Alright. Last question, Mihai, before we sign off, can you preview any upcoming improvements that people should look forward to?
Mihai: It’s the project I just wrapped, which is still being worked on. So the future may still evolve, but one thing we’re trying to add to to the platform is are you seeing my Figma, Beah?
Beah: Yeah, I can see.
Mihai: Okay, perfect. So this is very very rough. I think my is hiding my some of it. Basically we wanna add the share functionality to your responses, something that we we don’t do currently and we wanna do this at the response level but also at the entire conversation level. And once you once you click share, you’re basically sharing a response. You create a public link. That we’ll we’ll leave on our encrypted server with the encryption keys and all those other things that engineers are working on to make that super secure and everything. And then you can copy and and send it to to to people to to get that that response. And you’ll be able to to see it’s as someone who opens the link, you’ll be able to see what was shared and you you’ll be able to delineate what’s yours if you choose to reply or if you choose to add it to your own chats. So this is how it was designed. Sometimes we evolve the work as we play with it live when it’s when it’s in code. But it’s something that yeah should help a lot of people send a link as opposed to send a bunch of text.
Beah: Nice. That eggshell white is looking pretty sharp. Is that what it’s called, eggshell?
Mihai: It’s actual actual TW10 specifically.
Beah: Ooh, eggshell 10. Nice. Awesome. Alright. Thank you, Mihai. Anything you want to add before we before we close this out?
Mihai: This is great. I yeah, this is great. Thank you for having me.
Beah: Yeah, thanks for being on Duck Tales. Alright. Thanks, Mihai. Thanks everyone.


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In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Marc (VP, Engineering) discuss how we create, communicate, and challenge operational defaults to make better decisions at speed.
If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.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.
Beah: Hello and welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, the technology, and the people who help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or approach to AI. Today, you are going to hear about how we work, I guess, or one facet of how we work, which is using operational defaults and I have with me Marc, who is going to who I’m going to interview about operational defaults. Marc, do you wanna introduce yourself?
Marc: Yeah. Marc, I’m on the engineering team at DuckDuckGo.
Beah: Okay. That’s about all you need to know. and I’m Beah, I’m on the product team if if you haven’t seen me before. okay, cool. Well let’s jump in. What even is an operational default?
Marc: Yeah. Yeah, so defaults are I would say a deceptively simple concept. at at DuckDuckGo we’re always trying to leverage mental models to help us move more quickly and think more clearly and and things of that nature. in that context, the default effect is seen as a negative, right? And and I think we’ve all seen that in apps and in different places. Here we’re trying to leverage the the upside of that, where we’re basically taking any decision that you can make ahead of time that generally is true or has a right answer eighty percent of the time, we’re gonna call that a default. for that other twenty percent, we wanna leave room for our folks to be able to make exceptions, ideally very thoughtful exceptions.
Beah: When you say default is a negative in the app, you mean like, you know, if you get an Android phone and the default browser is Chrome and the default search engine is Google and it’s really hard for another player like DuckDuckGo to to break through th those defaults. Is that right? Yeah. Okay.
Marc: yeah, exactly. There’s there’s in Gabe’s book of mental models there’s the default effect and again it’s generally negative, but like I said, in this case we’re trying to use defaults as as something that we can leverage to help us go quicker.
Beah: Yeah, yeah. So how is that how is it different than a rule?
Marc: I mean it’s conceptually the same thing. I think rules are just more binary, right? Like this is something you do or you don’t do pretty much all the time. Where here we’re saying that these are things that are generally true. Like I said, eighty percent of the time is just the number that we made up. and that allows people to potentially make faster decisions. but we also want to include encourage people to think about what they’re doing and not just go on autopilot. And I think that’s the danger of catching something as a rule is that yeah, people will just kind of blindly follow it by default.
Beah: Yeah, yeah. I think that distinction is super important. Like, first of all, there are a lot of things where rules just have exceptions and therefore they’re not really good rules, you know? like you have to be pretty sure that there has to be a really good reason to make something a rule because it’s going to fit different situations differently. And yeah, it’s like once it becomes a rule, people like lose power to do anything differently, so they don’t think about it, they don’t feel empowered, and like with a default, there’s still a burden of judgment because you can overturn the default and choose a different path. but the idea, I think, would you care would you say this is a fair characterization is like A, don’t spend brain power thinking about like reinventing the wheel or thinking about something that doesn’t really warrant brain power, like there’s a good default, and B you know just to n to nudge people in the direction of the best average answer, you know.
Marc: Yeah, right. It’s leveraging decisions that we’ve deliberated over in the past and you know have come to a good decision on. and exactly what you said. We don’t want folks reinventing the wheel. That said, we do want I mean, we hire really smart people at DuckDuckGo and we wanna, you know, leverage and celebrate that. So yeah, everybody’s encouraged to challenge the norm, so to speak, or you know, pre existing defaults. And in fact that’s a big big part of this. whole concept is coming back and challenging these at times. But yeah, th they’re, you know, i in a lot of cases it’s it would just be wasted effort to be rethinking this from scratch. And as much as there are some that are that are rule or that you know might make better rules because they are more binary, there are others that really don’t make great defaults either. we had a decent example where it was like, yeah, there is something that was true, say fifty percent of the time. I don’t remember what the actual number was, but it just didn’t make a great default. I honestly don’t remember what it is, but yeah, d just to say that not everything c falls into that framework framework.
Beah: Yeah, that that’s a good segue. Yeah. T t give me some examples of things that we do think are good operational defaults or that we treat as such.
Marc: Sure, yeah. I mean we have a bunch I you know, one of the things that’s so powerful about this is that I think we all do this all the time. so for example at DuckDuckGo we try to prioritize quick wins, which I guess the other thing I should say about defaults is that they are somewhat self evident, like to the point where that’s why I said they’re kind of deceptively simple because there are things that you don’t necessarily feel like you should have to put a lot of time into, a a lot of thought into. But quick wins are one where, you know, we at the company we’ve been, you know, trying to push people toward that. Right. Like the idea of a quick win is something that is relatively low effort but has high impact. And I mean you would saying it out loud, you would say, of course that’s something we should prioritize. But I think it’s also important to acknowledge that people don’t think that way. instinctually in a lot of cases. They wanna sometimes they want to work on, you know, the hardest thing or what they see as the most impact when, yeah, maybe less would do. so that’s one. one of my favorite ones, and I think a lot of people at this company would agree is we do no meetings on Wednesdays. so that’s a very simple one that, yeah, you we we don’t I I I w wouldn’t call it a rule, whereas we don’t you know, you can have a meeting on a Wednesday and sometimes you have to, especially as if it’s with somebody external. But generally you shouldn’t be scheduling meetings on Wednesdays.
Beah: See, that’s interesting because I would have called that one a rule. We I specifically I would have called the rule no
Marc: I mean
Beah: If you want to hop on real time and talk to somebody internally about something as it comes up, fine. If you have like an external call, we’ve also accepted that. But I I try to enforce that one as a rule because I think that one, if it’s a default, people just don’t observe it. They break it way too much. That’s my opinion.
Marc: Well, I yeah, but I think you just gave a few exceptions that are good, right? Like I I’m not gonna necessarily schedule something ahead of time, but I will yeah, reach out to somebody and say, Hey, it would be quicker if we talked about this ad hoc. So maybe I mean, yeah, maybe it’s splitting hairs, but
Beah: Yeah, it’s interesting though, because I think of those as part of as like the rule is constrained. So I guess making a rule is is safer the more you constrain it. And you could you could arguably ha tackle one operational problem and either make a highly constrained rule that has exceptions and carve outs or a broader default and maybe sometimes both at the same time. So yeah, okay. All right, that’s a good one. give me you got another example.
Marc: Yeah, fair enough. Sure. Sure. Yeah, I I can give you another one. so this one we came up with recently and that’s working incrementally, which again, you would say and when I say work incrementally, I basically mean you know we’re we’re trying to ship smaller features more frequently or even larger features and smaller increments. you’re going back and you’re you know, making sure that you’re on the right track, etc. Which again sounds like obviously that’s something that you would want to do. But anyone who’s ever collaborated with anyone on anything, I think would would realize that, yeah, that’s I don’t think that’s a human default, right? Like I think we all, you know, want to have a task, go build whatever we’re supposed to build, and then show the awesome thing that we did. And yeah, that’s I think that’s a good instinct to have. But there are many cases where if you misunderstood something initially or new information pops up, yeah, it’s super important to make sure that you’re raising that up and collaborating with others on
Beah: Mm-hmm. So you s you said that we made that one recently. Like what does it mean to make an operational default? How do we codify or communicate these?
Marc: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I don’t think we’ve actually figured that out yet. We have a lot of defaults across the company. This one was was communicated to to several objectives. but yeah, it’s not I would say it’s written down, but it’s not there’s no like internal glossary or internal directory of of defaults or anything like that. It’s basically just a reminder for folks. And again, it seems like it’s something that you should obviously do, but I think it’s important to remind people of these things.
Beah: Yeah, so like we basically we write things down in the form of like messages and or or really I mean anyway, but and I think that can happen maybe one thing that’s worth saying is that that that can happen at different levels of the organization. Like sometimes you have a group of five people working on an objective and they might adopt their own defaults or ways of operating. And then on the other hand, once something once we like believe something to be
Marc: Sure.
Beah: Sorry, I don’t know if listeners can hear that, but my dog is drinking some water right now. So we’ll see if that comes through. you know, once we’re really confident in something and that it’s like broadly applicable across the organization, then we might communicate it at like a higher level and codify it a little bit more more strongly as a default.
Marc: Yeah, and that’s kind of where that’s kind of where we are with this right now. We’ve communicated it to a couple of objectives. You know, objectives end up having their own culture, intentionally or otherwise, and this is yeah, an attempt to kind of test it on a smaller care scale before we start communicating it more broadly. and I I have one other I can give. This one’s much more engineering centric, but so we’re all working on AI quite a bit these days.
Beah: Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Marc: And I think anybody that’s ever worked with, well, anybody that’s ever used AI will tell you that or has observed that you don’t get the same answer twice, right? It’s it’s you know so-called non-deterministic output. so in order for us to build products leveraging AI, it’s really important that we have evaluations up front, right? That you start with, you know, say a list of if I have question why. or sorry, question X, I’m gonna get answer Y, or at least something in the general with the general gist of of answer y. and yeah, because you can’t always super accurately predict what’s gonna come out, it’s really important that before we start building something, you know, you you have this eval or evaluation data set so that you know when you’re doing a good job or or when you’re when you’re not. I think that one honestly that one’s fairly close to a rule in my book, in terms of the engineering expectations we have, but there are definitely cases where it, you know, it doesn’t make sense or it’s too much effort to start there.
Beah: Yeah. And so like because that’s a default, even if people most people kind of think it’s a best practice, codifying it as a default means that if somebody decides not to do it, they might get the question, why? Are you sure? And they have to like defend basically if you don’t use a default, you have to have a good answer.
Marc: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Yes, you have to have yeah, there’s there’s we encourage people to make exceptions, but it’s gotta be well reasoned.
Beah: Up there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Cool. Can you think of any defaults that we’ve adopted as an organization or on a team and then like decided were the wrong default and changed them?
Marc: Yeah, I thought about this one a bit. I I can’t think of one where we actually decided this was the wrong default. But I can there there are several that we have you know, potentially evolved over time, and that continue to evolve. The one and and yeah, this one is also super engineering specific. But the one that that comes to mind is, you know, initially all of our back end engineers were the default for all of them was to use Perl for our back-end services, the Perl programming language. But we made exceptions there, you know, because no language is the right tool for every job. So, you know, if we were developing something that Perl just wasn’t the right tool for, we gave people the space to make a case to not use it. That and that was true for a number of years. I think now I wouldn’t call that a default anymore. I don’t think that that that is the starting place for most folks, like when we’re developing a new a new service. so maybe that’s one that as you would either say is evolved or or maybe retired is a better way to put it. But yeah, I I can’t think of one where I think we were actually outright wrong, but definitely new information and things come in and we change them.
Beah: Mm. Yeah. One that kinda one that comes to mind to me that maybe went from having a not really having defined a default intentionally, but let kind of the flow of the stream define itself was we we, you know, as some listeners may know, our company is organized into a a bunch of objectives, like teams working towards some important goal for the company. And those objectives are expected to hold what we call an assessment every so often to kind of like redefine the strategy in the roadmap. And we I think f for the first maybe f few years I was here, we didn’t have an explicit expectation on how often that happened, but I think the sort of adopted default was a pretty long period, like maybe on average, I don’t know, five months, six months. something like that and then at some point we what’s that?
Marc: Yeah, when you felt like it was important. I said when you felt like it was important, it was very I think very subjective.
Beah: Yeah. Well and it was like easy to procrastinate if you were leading an objective, you know, like ‘cause it felt like a time like a thing you’d have to put time into and put yourself out there. And so it just kind of was like getting long. But in reality we observed that when people ran assessments more often, we had better roadmaps and better decision making and, you know, sort of less leaving the track without, you know, the help to get back on the track and
Marc: Yeah.
Beah: And so at some point we I think maybe said like let’s default to every eight weeks and then we maybe t brought that back to six. Right now it’s it’s six weeks is the default. and I think that’s been a nice improvement to make that explicit.
Marc: It’s actually a it’s a good example of working incrementally over a you know, different horiz time horizon. But yeah, for sure.
Beah: Yeah. Cool. Anything else you want to add, Marc, before we wrap this?
Marc: I don’t think so. I think again, I feel like I have to keep saying that a lot of these are self evident because it just sounds so obvious in a lot of cases, but it is yeah, I think I think it leads to better results and and hopefully we’re gonna see that very soon in these objectives that where we’ve introduced it and yeah, r really important to challenge them as well.
Beah: Yeah, there’s probably a lot of obvious things that people don’t do on the regular because of some cognitive, you know, glitch or habit or, you know, your predictably irrational behavior. So yeah, just making it explicit I think can be powerful. Cool. All right. Well, thank you, Marc, and see you around.
Marc: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, thanks.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com

In this episode, Cristina (CMO) and Zack (Senior Director, Marketing) discuss our new Duck.ai ad, how we develop, test, and measure creative and campaigns, and why we do a lot of the work in-house.
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.
If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.com.
Cristina: Hi, and welcome to Duck Tales, 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. Hi, I’m Cristina. I’m on the marketing team, and I’m here today with Zack. Do you want to introduce yourself?
Zack: Yeah, my name is Zack Einhorn. I’m on the marketing team as well at DuckDuckGo and been here for nine years now. and I live in LA. Happy to be here.
Cristina: Happy to have you, thanks for joining. So today we’re gonna talk about our new ad campaign. On June 29th, we launched Prying Eyes, the name of our first national brand campaign for Duck.ai. And for those of you who don’t know what Duck.ai is, it is a way to chat privately with ChatGPT and other AIs, all in one place for free, no login. So today we’re gonna go behind the scenes, how it came together. Our unique development and production process, our views on AI, and more. Before we jump in, I just want to say to everyone listening: love it, hate it, have ideas for a new episode, please write us at podcast@duckduckgo.com. That’s podcast@duckduckgo.com. We will read all of them and would appreciate any feedback. So, first question: Zack, why why a brand campaign for Duck.ai and why now?
Zack: Yeah, well, you know, for years we had been focused on you know performance marketing for as an alternative to Google and Chrome and focusing on search and browse. And we’re introducing a new product market that has virtually zero awareness. And we’re really confident about the product market fit. We know that there’s a lot of built-up anxiety around AI and a desire for private alternatives. And so we know it’s time to let people know that one exists and from a company that you trust and have been trusting.
Cristina: So I find that when I chat with people about what I do, they think the the making the ad portion of my work is the most interesting, right? And they’ll ask, like what is it like to be on set and all these kind of things? So I think a lot of people find that industry but interesting. But even for industry veterans, it’s maybe interesting to hear about how we at DuckDuckGo make an ad, because it’s a different bit different than how most companies do it. Can you dive into that?
Zack: Yeah, absolutely. so you know, most companies, and in my in my experience, the prior companies, you know, they kind of hand everything over to one agency. You know, everything is sort of with one big house strategy, research, testing. and the way that we do it is a little bit different. Like you said, we’re we tend to we like to be really hands on. and I think, you know, one thing that makes us pretty different too is that, you know, we’re we you know we’re some of like the foremost researchers on this space at the company. And so we you know, whereas it might be really useful if you’re in like a you know a a a category, like you know, consumer package goods, to have like the expertise of an agency that may have many, many clients in that space and can and can, you know, give you strategy and insight into areas that you may not have. but because we really you know, we have a lot of that research and talent in house, the strategy really you know comes from us. and you know, we tend to lean on agencies more for like additional initial ideation. and then from there we really take things into our own hands. We have we have freelancers that we’ve gone back to a handful of times to help us develop ideas. We’ve got internal talent that helps us develop ideas. and then we have production companies that we work directly with. And that I think is a real for us. You know, we we save a lot of, I think, you know, we save a lot of time in the game of telephone that you usually play with your with your agency by being able to, you know, handpick the director, be you know deeply involved in the post-production, like attending edit sessions, coloring. and I think that that gives us a advantage because you know not only do we get to accelerate by making those being hands-on in those choices, but we also continuously build those skill sets. And so you know we’ve been doing it now, we’ve been doing it this way and kind of building on that process for five years now. And we’ve just we’ve built up a a a ton of expertise internally and done a lot of hot like you know, a lot of good hiring to fill the the areas of expertise that we didn’t have, expanded our network of partners. yeah, we’ve really kind of built up this this in-house team.
Cristina: Yeah, thanks for walking us through that. So internally, the team has been calling this ad Prying Eyes. Like, what does that mean? Where did the idea come from?
Zack: Yeah, absolutely. So it came from one of our one of our agency partners. You know, we we’d we went through a process where you know we realized one of the things that we weren’t super strong at internally was coming up with the initial idea. and so we ran through a process where we worked with a series of agencies and freelancers to to come up with ideas. One of them came up with this idea that was really sticking with us where we had you know giant photorealistic eyeballs following you know c following people and and you know in you know invading their space when they’re doing asking AI sensitive questions. And we had a few directions we were looking at, and we had done a bunch of research. And the thing that we kept coming back to was this thing we called exposure anxiety. And the crux of it was that we realized that when we got a level down into the specific things that people were worried about being spied on. you know, giving away when they’re when they’re using AI, that it became like a bit polarizing. Like, you know, they once you used a specific example, people are like, well that’s not quite really me. But we found the thing that really stuck for everyone, and that was the most visceral thing, which I think is the most important because I think that’s what sticks with you it emotionally in an ad and will make you think of it later and motivate you, was just the actual sensation of of being watched. That was the through line that whether you were worried about, you know, asking AI about something related to, you know, health, or whether you were asking about an issue going on at work, or you know, whether you’re asking AI you know for symptoms of, you know, something that your that your kids dealing with, that that no matter what it was, everyone shared this this this feeling of exposure anxiety and you know what what can make you you know what is more exposing than feeling like there are giant eyes behind you watching everything that you that you type.
Cristina: Yeah, this was this was a fun concept. you know, we considered a lot of different ideas, and for me, just seeing and thinking about the eyeballs was just so arresting, right? In a really clear visual way to encompass the feelings that we had heard in research, right? We’re a very data-driven company, and so research is really important to us. We’re not just thinking of something that looks cool, it needs to be grounded in an insight that we think relates back to the problem we’re trying to solve.
Zack: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it also just there was a lot of connectivity to to like our overall message, too, like, you know, in in terms of of privacy and and and prior campaigns. I think that we, when we went in, I think we really thought we want something that is uniquely AI. but I think what we found is that a lot of the anxiety around AI is kind of an evolution of the of the anxiety that already existed. So just like the way, just the way that AI is the newest way that people are are using the internet and and how it’s you know it’s more personalized and you know tailored than than than search and browse was it’s also that much more viscerally you know uncomfortable you know you’re you’re a lot more you know, likely to have sort of these uncanny experiences where, you know, AI will bring up a prior conversation or mention a tidbit that you thought, you know, wasn’t being logged, you know. and and so I think it really helped draw that draw that through line.
Cristina: Yeah. Yeah, I I personally feel very passionate that if someone is going to use AI, they should use Duck.ai because it’s hard to anticipate just how this data will be used from other companies in the future. But I think we can all anticipate, probably not in a great way, right? In terms of privacy. On the last episode I was on, we talked about how not everybody wants AI, right? And that’s why we feel so strongly about making it optional. So how do you think about making an ad for AI?
Zack: Yeah, I mean I think that’s a very real subset of people. I look at, you know, the way that I look at DuckDuckGo’s mission is, you know, I think we, you know, I look at the goal of DuckDuckGo to provide for people the the best quality possible version of the internet that you are used to using, but private. And so I think, you know, that is the that is the the the mass of people that we saw that that we that we serve. AI adoption is, you know, well over fifty percent and growing. And so I think you know it’s really important that we serve that audience. at the same time, you know, we firmly, while while we believe, you know, in providing the pro in private AI, we also, you know, we also take exception to the way that AI is being sort of jammed down people’s throat by other by other companies. and you know, we take pride and we think it, I think I we think it’s you know goes along with our overall mission of build of raising the standard of trust online. to give people the ability to control AI and use it on their own on their own terms. And so even in our in even in our our advertising of our AI products, we’re very clear you know in in our messaging, like for example, the television ad in our end card and VO to say that you know Duck.ai is is from DuckDuckGo and that our our policy here is that AI is private and optional. And so we you know we want to be clear that that is all you know that is our brand’s stance.
Cristina: Yeah, absolutely. So we’re spending all this money on TV and digital and all these channels. How do we know if it works? Like what what are we trying to achieve here and what are those signals?
Zack: Yeah, I mean it is, you know, raising brand awareness is meaningfully harder to read than than you know performance performance marketing. and it takes time. you know, we we I think the bottom line is we won’t know, we won’t know right away. the what we’ve seen from the initial tests is you know, we we’re able to get a read on awareness on a two to three month kind of timeline to see if we’re moving that. usage usually lags behind that. and so I think, you know, a lot of times when you’re when you’re looking at awareness, I think what you’re looking at is is, you know, you have you have immediate you know you have immediate key performance indicators which for us are all are all centered around awareness you know we’re doing pulse checks for every four weeks we’re we’re revisiting a survey and we’re seeing if we’ve if we’ve raised it. and then in terms of driving actual growth, I think it’s really more of a higher level question of running that strategy for long enough to be able to create the the flywheel and seeing how it impacts growth holistically. And so I think that is something that’s probably on a longer you know, timeline closer to, you know, six months to a year where you can really see the the big impact of focusing on on brand awareness. And that’s that is similar to what we saw you know, several years ago when we were doing big brand awareness push for the core product.
Cristina: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a bit of a patience game, right? Wait waiting to see if these metrics go up and maybe leaning on some early indicators, but it’s not that instant gratification that you get from a direct response camp.
Zack: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We are looking at the direct response metrics on but but trying to set expectations that that you know we’re in a we’re in a teach people our name place.
Cristina: Yeah. So so you and the team have been working hard on this for months. Maybe you get to take a little bit of a break now while, you know, the big channels are out there and you’re waiting for some of the data to come in, but I’m sure that’s not all. So do you want to speak to what’s next?
Zack: Yeah, I mean I think you know, not really taking a break. trying to, you know, I think we had real we have really you know, ambitious goals for this campaign. I think, you know, we we’re we are ramping up in all senses of the word. You know, we’re starting out with we’re starting out heavily in a in a in a handful of channels, very, very video centric, you know, CTV, YouTube, and and social, but we’re really looking to build out the 360 of the campaign. We’re looking at a handful of other channels inclusive of out of home and audio and looking to expand overall coverage pr we’ve got we’ve got a bunch of a bunch of stuff deck to to help fill out this campaign and and bring it to life on a larger scale.
Cristina: Yeah, absolutely. I’m very excited that this is finally out there now and working to not only teach people the name, but hopefully get people using it. So again, if you haven’t yet, try Duck.ai. Again, it’s free, no login required. So if you want to do an AI search, but you want to do more privately, give it a go. Zack, it was really great chatting with you today and kind of reliving the work of the last few months. Thank you and the team for all of your hard work. and again, very exciting that the ads are out there now.
Zack: Mm-hmm. Thank you. Appreciate you having me. I’m very excited.
Cristina: Alrighty. Yeah. Okay, well that’s all for now and stay tuned for future episodes of Duck Tales. See you later.


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In this episode, Peter (Product) and Dave (Privacy) discuss YouTube Ad Blocking, why we built it, how it works, and how it differs from Duck Player.
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.
If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.com.
Show notes: Ad Blocking is enabled by default for Mac, iOS and Windows browsers. It will be enabled by default for Android soon, but for now can be turned on in settings.
Peter: Hello everyone and welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo, we discuss the stories, technology, and the people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each of these episodes, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or things like approaches to AI. My name is Peter. I’m on the product team at DuckDuckGo, and I’m joined with my colleague Dave. Dave, do you want to introduce yourself?
Dave: Sure. Yeah. Hey, I’m Dave. I generally work on the browser experience at DuckDuckGo. That means working on privacy protections, working on making sure that websites work the way that you expect them to work and yeah, making sure that you have a good experience browsing the web.
Peter: Awesome. And today we’re gonna be talking about ad blocking, more specifically YouTube ad blocking, but I think we’re gonna talk also just generally about about ad blocking. So Dave, why don’t we why don’t we start at the top? Does DuckDuckGo browser block ads today?
Dave: If if you’ve used one of our browsers, you’ve probably noticed that you see quite a few fewer ads. So that’s a side effect of our tracker blocking. So the reason that you’re seeing fewer ads is a lot of these ads come with trackers, you know. They want to see how you interact with the ad. They want more info about you to determine, you know, is that like a a good impression? And you know, they want to build these profiles and all of that. So we block those requests before they’re initiated. And that leads to many fewer ads across the web. But we don’t deploy a like a specific ad blocking feature.
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Peter: Got it. And so we what what you’re basically saying is a lot of these companies that, you know, serve up advertising are also tracking the heck out of people. And so by by virtue of the fact that we block that tracking, we are basically blocking you know a lot of the advertisements on the internet.
Dave: That’s right. That’s right.
Peter: Makes sense. And so what’s changing about our ad blocking?
Dave: Yeah, so what we’re doing here, and as Peter said, we we’re starting with YouTube. We r have received a ton of user feedback asking for us to do something about this. As as you probably know, YouTube shows up to you know several minutes of ads before videos, during videos, just constantly. And what what’s changing here is we have deployed we’re working on deploying a feature that will just prevent these ads from loading. So instead of, you know, waiting thirty to seconds to a minute before you can watch a video and then getting interrupted in the middle of a video, you should be able to watch the video right away and without interruptions.
Peter: Yeah, and so a a lot of you’re saying a lot of our users have been asking for the ability to block ads on on YouTube. I think it’s safe to say that, you know, a lot of DuckDuckGo search users who historically have used other browsers, have have used extensions, ad block extensions to get this benefit. And so Dave, you’re saying a lot of these users have asked us for the similar sort of capability in our browsers.
Dave: Yeah, that’s right. Extensions are a very powerful tool. We don’t export extensions in our browsers for for good reason. So they can be a blessing and a curse. If if you’re using the right extensions, there are safe extensions and they can improve your browsing experience by like you know blocking ads or you know auto-filling password fields, that kind of stuff. But they’re also a a really large risk because there are a lot of malicious extensions out there and unscrupulous extensions out there that can you know get full access to everything within the web pages that you’re looking at and exfiltrate your data and track what you’re doing online without you even realizing.
Peter: Mm-hmm.
Peter: Yeah, I I remember over the last few years, every few months there seems to be a story about some extension that that a lot of people installed that either went rogue or maybe got sold to another company and then they use that extension to to data mine people and spy on their their online browsing behavior overall. And so you’re you’re basically saying, Dave, by adding this capability, the YouTube ad blocking natively to our browser applications. Not only is it easy for our users to enable and get that benefit, but it is also safe to do so. Is that right?
Dave: That’s exactly right.
Peter: Awesome. Cool. And so we built this based on user demand. But a lot of our browser users already have the benefit of something we call Duck Player. Can you explain what Duck Player is and then let’s talk about how Duck Player differs from the YouTube ad blocking that we’re talking about?
Dave: Yeah, totally. So Duck Player, we like to think about it as kind of a theater mode. So if you visit YouTube or you load a YouTube link, you can load it in this kind of standalone window within our browsers that we call Duck Player. And what what’s happening there is we’re loading it through this separate YouTube no cookie domain. And and the advantage of what we’re doing there is that it doesn’t like when you watch videos, they’re they’re not tied to your account and it they won’t influence your viewing history or your, you know, recommended videos. But over time we’ve we’ve seen quite a bit of feedback from users about issues that they’ve run into with Duck Player and that that have made them go back and watch videos on YouTube’s main page. So I can go into this a a little bit here. So quite often, I guess all the time, when when a when a content creator uploads a video to YouTube, they can decide whether they want that video to be viewable on YouTube or whether they want it to be able to be embedded on other sites. So if they say, no, we don’t want this to be embedded on other sites, that makes it so it also can’t be watched in Duck Player. And there are a couple other edge cases here that prevent users from watching videos in in Duck Player. So if there’s an age restriction on a video that you have to sign in to your YouTube account in order to watch the video, that means you also can’t watch it there. And you know th they’re there a variety of issues that we’ve run into or heard from heard about from users.
Peter: That makes sense. Yeah, I I think I think it’s safe to say that our our users love Duck Player. A. We we’ve heard from a lot of users that it’s it’s a killer feature that they they use all the time. But as as you said, yeah, between people who do want sometimes they want to see the full full comments and things like that that you’re not gonna get in Duck Player, they want to see those on YouTube, but they also want to benefit from the the ad free experience. That’s part of the reason we built the YouTube ad blocking and to to avoid some of the error messages that you referred to, which tend to come up pretty often, particularly on on desktop browsers, the error where video cannot be watched because a content creator disallowed it from being watched outside of YouTube. It comes up a couple percent of the time overall. So with this new YouTube ad blocking, it should be a little bit more seamless for everybody. Cool.
Dave: Yeah, and I I just want to make it clear that Duck Player’s not going anywhere. That that still exists. You can still choose to use it. We’re just creating more optionality here.
Peter: Awesome. And and that means that anyone who’s currently setting Duck Player to always load videos in Duck Player, they should continue to have that experience as their default, right?
Dave: That’s right.
Peter: That’s great. Talk talk a little bit about building out the YouTube ad blocking capabilities. What what were any main challenges we hit along the way?
Dave: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so as you know, we have a we have a browser on four different platforms, Android, iOS, Mac OS, and Windows. Slightly different architecture on each platform. Websites literally differently between, you know, they they often have like a mobile version and a desktop version. So it can be a challenge to ship parity across all all platforms. I think the the trickiest part about building ad blocking for YouTube is it’s it’s not just a simple block this request and ads won’t load. I think you know YouTube and other large websites are incentivized to prevent users from ad from blocking their ads, which means they make it a a little bit more challenging to work around that. So what we’re doing here is, you know, we we are blocking a few requests, but we’re also injecting several different scripts into the page that kind of you know rearrange how the ad calls load into the videos.
Peter: Hmm. And and if if you our users who are using the new capability, if they if they see issues come up through their use of it, is there a way that they can tell us about that?
Dave: Yeah, that’s a good point. Absolutely. Please, if you run into any issues using this new feature, you can either submit browser feedback, which is through through the settings page. We also offer a more direct way to submit feedback about a problem you’re experiencing with a specific site. We call it a a broken site report. You can access that through the privacy dashboard, which can be found by clicking the the little shield icon in the address bar. And if you just fill that out, our team does read these reports and we we try to we we do everything we can to respond to them as quickly as possible.
Peter: Awesome. I think it’s also fair to say that our team at DuckDuckGo is pretty active on Reddit, particularly the DuckDuckGo subreddit. And so if you prefer, if you want to post something there about your experience, by all means, we we will we will engage with you. We’d love to hear you know the direct feedback and and and sometimes help troubleshoot. And that that goes both ways. We certainly like to help people if they run into any issues, and that helps us understand if there are some issues on particular machines that we may not be seeing internally and helps us chase those issues down overall. Awesome. Dave, what’s t tell us a little bit about when people can expect to see this.
Dave: Yeah, so as we record this, it’s currently rolling out to each of our platforms. By the time that you are watching or listening to this, you should be able to access it on all four of our platforms. If you you know, we’re we’re enabling it by default for users, and you can also go into settings and check there’s a new there should be a new ad blocking menu item there, and you can, you know, make sure that it’s enabled or disable it if you don’t want it, if you like ads.
Peter: Cool. Well I hope all of our users are ex as excited about this feature as we are, those of us the internally that built it out. And like we said, we’re always eager to hear feedback if you have any. And with that, Dave, thank you for joining me on this Duck Tales episode. See y’all next time.
Dave: Thanks, Peter.


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