"Assist" at DuckDuckGo. Is this AI?

hazel · 06-19-2025, 05:17 AM

Nowadays, whenever I do a DDG search, there is a box labelled Assist containing a brief answer right at the top of the page alongside the inevitable Wikipedia entry. At the bottom, it says "Auto-generated based on listed sources. May contain inaccuracies". Is this an AI like Google's Gemini?

It offers you an opportunity to ask a follow-up question or to chat, which I must say creeps me out. It's bad enough having these bots around without having to be friendly to them.

boughtonp · 06-19-2025, 08:10 AM

I guess that means they've re-badged "AI-Assisted Answers" to just "Assist".

There should be a "thumbs down" icon somewhere near the box - press it and you can give feedback. Who knows whether that'll make any difference.

Steve48220 · 06-19-2025, 10:16 AM

There's an option to turn that off in the settings along with all the other annoyances. Open the Search Settings menu (gear icon), All Search Settings, AI Features tab.

teckk · 06-19-2025, 11:01 AM

I never have scripts and images turned on when searching. I don't see any adds, any of that.

Use this user agent:

Code:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/127.0.6533.56 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

And search with this duck url:
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/

Search results look like this:
https://0x0.st/8IXn.png

hazel · 06-19-2025, 11:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steve48220

There's an option to turn that off in the settings along with all the other annoyances. Open the Search Settings menu (gear icon), All Search Settings, AI Features tab.

I can't find that anywhere on my FF menu.

Steve48220 · 06-19-2025, 11:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hazel

I can't find that anywhere on my FF menu.

It's not in firefox, it's on the DDG results page after you search for something - at least for me in the US.

hazel · 06-20-2025, 12:45 AM

Thanks. Got it now.