Inside DuckDuckGo

In this episode, Beah (SVP, Product) and Omid (Product) discuss Duck Player, how it’s private, and how to use it. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.Show notes: Duck Player is available in all DuckDuckGo browsers. When you click on a YouTube video either within YouTube or our Search results, you’ll be asked if you want to view in Duck Player. Beah: Hello and welcome to DuckTales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product, updates, approach to AI, or how we operate as a company. In this episode, you’ll hear about a feature called... Oh, Omid, do you want to say it?Omid: Duck PlayerBeah: And I’m Beah Burger-Lenahan. If you’ve been watching DuckTales, you’ve maybe met me already. I’m on the product team here, but you probably haven’t met Omid, so Omid, why don’t you introduce yourself?Omid: Hello, my name is Omid. I’m also on the product team. Been at DuckDuckGo for a little over four years and have worked on a lot of our browser stuff, including email protection, our password manager, and Duck Player, which we’re talking about today.Beah: Sweet. So why don’t you start us off by just explaining what Duck Player is.Omid: Yeah, in a nutshell, Duck Player is a more private way to watch YouTube videos with fewer ads and with no distractions. I can, I think, do a screen share and kind of show you that in action, fingers crossed if this works.Beah: This is actually our second time starting this episode because the first time it didn’t work.Omid: Yeah. So here’s our browser. I’ve got a couple of tabs open. There’s really two main ways to get to Duck Player. If you’re on YouTube and you click on a video, we’ll ask you if you want to watch in Duck Player or No Thank You, which we just watch in right on YouTube as you would normally expect. So if I turn on Duck Player, it opens in a new tab and the video just starts playing.Beah: Okay.Omid: You have the option to always open these videos in Duck Player. You could always get back to YouTube with this button to watch on YouTube, but it’s just your video, nothing else. And all of the personalized ads are gone. So I can kind of go into like maybe some of the details about how that works, if that sounds good.Beah: Yeah, and actually maybe before that, can you just tell people how do they even get Duck Player?Omid: Yeah, so Duck Player is available in all of our browsers, so Mac OS, Windows, iOS, and Android. And by default, when you load a video, you’re going to get asked that question if you want to use Duck Player, whether you’re on YouTube and you have this question here, which you can also remember your choice, or if you’re on search and click on a YouTube video. We’re also going to ask you if you want to watch it on YouTube or watch it in Duck Player.Beah: Got it. Okay, yeah, let’s talk. Tell me a little bit about why we build it and what problem it solves.Omid: Yeah, so we built it as a feature that launched, I guess I could stop sharing screen now, a feature that, it’s still on my screen and it’s there and I know exactly what’s happening. But Duck Player was a kind of a marquee feature of our Mac OS browser launch. This was, I think a bit over three years ago.Beah: You don’t want to though. You want to keep watching the Bad Bunny Tiny Desk. Okay, you’re watching. You’re not even listening to what you’re saying.Omid: We did some research, or at least I think found some third party research about people’s usage in browsers, what they use them for, particularly on desktop and video consumption, specifically on YouTube was a huge use case. And so we wanted to be able to have something that made doing those things more private, because that means more people have more privacy protections. And it was also a differentiator for our browser launch as we were getting into the desktop browser space because we’ve had the mobile apps for a little while and Mac OS was our first desktop browser launch.Beah: Yeah. Yeah. And if I recall correctly, you know, we’d been also doing a bunch of research on ad blocking and learned that the, the one of the spaces, maybe the space where people were most annoyed by, creeped out by ads was video and Duck Player doesn’t show, like you don’t get targeted ads when you’re using Duck Player.Omid: Yeah, yeah, so the way that it works is that YouTube offers this privacy enhanced mode for any embedded video. So if you see like a YouTube video embedded on the web, the person who’s implementing that, making that webpage that has the YouTube video on it can turn on this privacy enhanced mode, but it’s optional and you have to opt into it and I assume not many people do.Beah: Okay.Omid: And so what Duck Player works is we have this special page that loads in the browser and the video you’re trying to watch gets embedded into that special page and we turn on this privacy enhanced mode. And within privacy enhanced mode, we found in our testing that there’s been almost no ads at all and nearly all the ads have not shown up there, but YouTube specifically says that there’s no personalized ads that get shown there. It’s coming from a different domain that uses different cookies entirely and so all the personalization stuff actually can’t happen technically because it’s doing this special privacy stuff, which is nice.Beah: Sweet. And I should have asked this earlier, but I mean, do I have to pay to use Duck Player?Omid: No, you do not. It is entirely free. It’s actually the same technology that we have within our videos vertical on search. So even if you’re not in our browsers, we offer a private way to watch videos if you’re in the videos tab on the search results page. And that uses the exact same thing where we have this privacy enhanced mode for the embedded video. But for the full experience, you’ll be able to get like the full distraction free watching that’s within our browsers. And that’s a free feature.Beah: Got it. Cool, do you have any favorite things personally about Duck Player?Omid: I have a five-year-old daughter. I think the example that you saw on the search was like a how to draw a Hello Kitty character video. And so exactly if there was a Spotify Wrapped for those video searches it’d be Hello Kitty, K-pop, Demon Hunters. But like I’m very conscious of the content and the amount of videos that my five year old is exposed to and watches. And so if you just loaded the YouTube homepage, you’re kind of inundated with like all these recommendations and different things that are thrown at you. And after you watch, when you’re watching a video, you have a side rail of all these videos. After you watch the video, it’s like, here’s more, or it’ll autoplay to the next one. And so if I’m just trying to show my daughter how to draw a Hello Kitty in a video, we load that in Duck Player. We watch only the video and it’s done. And it’s like the perfect use case for that.Beah: Nice. That’s a pretty good one. Tell me about have there been any particular challenges or surprises along the way as you’ve built Duck Player?Omid: I think the biggest challenge, it kind of continues to be a little bit of a challenge, is that not all, not 100% of videos can be viewed in Duck Player. If you’re a YouTube creator and you upload a video, there’s an option that you can say that you don’t want to allow your videos to be embedded, and that includes anywhere. So if someone was trying to add your video to their own website, they couldn’t do it, and Duck Player is included in that. And then there’s also some age-restricted content and the way that YouTube does age verification is you have to log in to your account to verify your age. And because it’s on an entirely separate domain that the privacy enhanced mode gets served from that kind of breaks the entire like privacy and personalization stuff. So there’s some small amount of videos that cannot be loaded in Duck Player for those reasons. We estimate it to be somewhere around like 3% ish on desktop. And it’s unfortunate, but we also allow people to go to YouTube and there’s a number of other use cases where you might want to go to YouTube to you know subscribe to the channel, like view the comments or something so it’s purely complementary to it and that was a challenge to communicate why people couldn’t watch those videos when that small amount does happen.Beah: Did we try any ways of getting around those limitations or just kind of there’s nothing you can do?Omid: Yeah, for the ones where it’s just not allowed to be embedded, there’s really nothing we can do. Another category is some YouTube bot detection. They do some pretty sophisticated things, we suspect, trying to determine if you’re a bot or not. And if some combination of those things get triggered, they’ll ask you to also log in to verify that you’re not a bot. And so we’ve tried to look into ways that we can try to get around some of that, too. But it’s really, really tricky and complicated. And so our messaging is right now to you can go to YouTube and watch it. And if there’s ways in the future we can improve that, we’ll certainly do it. But we’re trying to just at least communicate it really well to people so they understand what’s going on.Beah: Have you ever been submitting multiple Hello Kitty queries repeatedly and been blocked as a bot?Omid: I haven’t yet, if I was YouTube’s detection algorithm, I would probably flag that considering the volume.Beah: Yeah, yeah, I would flag that. Cool, okay. So tell me, like, are there anything, we launched the first version of Duck Player quite a while ago, like, anything significant that we’ve changed about it along the way?Omid: The biggest thing I would say is probably on mobile. We launched Duck Player on mobile a bit after the desktop launch. And one of the things that we learned there as we were doing some testing was that, as you saw when I demoed it, you get this question in the video. It says, like, do you want to turn on Duck Player? And when we were on mobile with the smaller screen and it taking up a bigger percentage of that, we learned that people kind of don’t really know where that message is coming from, or they maybe confuse that message to be coming from somewhere else, like it’s coming from YouTube itself or coming from the video or it’s an ad itself because they see ads in that space so frequently. And so on iOS in particular, we actually made a change where we made that prompt be more attached to the browser UI so that when we ask you if you want to use Duck Player, it’s out of the way. And we kind of make sure that we’re not like interrupting people or that it’s clearer to them that this is coming from DuckDuckGo. It’s a feature you can do, you can watch it in Duck Player if you want to, and if you don’t want to, it’s not blocking you in a lot of ways.Beah: Yeah, yeah, I personally much prefer the iOS version. Check it out if you have an iOS device. Cool. Yeah, anything that we haven’t touched on that you want to add?Omid: I mentioned the constant recommendations and YouTube kind of throwing more and more videos at you. One thing I think I maybe had glossed over was if you watch videos in Duck Player, those views don’t get fed into your YouTube history and therefore your algorithm and more recommendations. So it’s another privacy benefit of using Duck Player as well.Beah: Nice. Okay, wait, I have one more question. Recommend one, only one video on the entirety of YouTube that users who want to go test out Duck Player should look up and watch.Omid: On the spot, just like that. It’s hard for me to argue against the Bad Bunny Tiny Desk Concert that I just pulled up, but I will also say, if you go to any of those NPR Tiny Desk Concerts, I would be shocked if you didn’t have some artists that you knew. There’s been so many of them on there, so find a Tiny Desk Concert and watch that. It’s fantastic.Beah: Nice. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Omid. It was a pleasure talking with you about Duck Player.Omid: Yeah, thank you. Likewise.Beah: We’ll be back again for some other topic in the future.Omid: Sounds good. Thanks, Beah.Beah: Alright. Later. 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, Gabriel (Founder) and Ewa (Product) discuss Search Assist, why we’re so focused on letting users control their experience, and future improvements. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.Show notes: Learn more about the “More” button in Search Assist here. Gabriel Hello everybody, welcome to DuckTales. I’m Gabriel, founder of DuckDuckGo. With me is Ewa. You wanna introduce yourself, Ewa?Ewa Hi everyone, I’m Ewa Sobula. I’m a product person at DuckDuckGo based in Poland.Gabriel Cool, we are going to talk about search assist today. We’ve done one episode before when we introduced the more button. This is the stuff on the top of search results where our anonymous AI is answering queries for you and you can click more, but we’re gonna go take a step back and just kind of talk about the feature in general. ⁓ As a precursor, I’ve said this a bunch of times. at AI episodes, but ⁓ our guiding principles for AI features are that they’re useful, private, and optional. in this case, and I know people really appreciate that, ⁓ we think Search Assist is extremely useful, and we’ll get into that, but it is also optional. So you can turn it off if you like. It’s really easy to do so. There’s toggles actually within Search Assist itself, but also in the browser and search settings. And of course, it’s private like the rest of our search results. It’s completely anonymous. ⁓ So with that, yeah, let’s just jump from the highest level. What is Search Assist and how does it work?Ewa So as you mentioned, search assist is our AI generated instant answer to search queries that we show up on top of search results page. Once we are confident that this is gonna be the optimal answer to use a query, meaning for queries where you either ask a question or really are looking for a quick summary. And ⁓ we are now showing it on like roughly quarter of our searches and we are using LLMs to create the answer but what is important is that we actually grounded in the right sources and like verified and checked sources so it’s not like generated literally and just by an LLM but we find the relevant sources to the search query. we analyze them and we synthesize the concise one, two sentences also that we show on top of SERP when it’s really relevant. Or we also show like lower down the page where you might have different intent. ⁓ But still it could be useful if it’s something that you scroll down to.Gabriel Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ And I want to get into the, you mentioned it being concise and that’s one of the main differences I feel we have with Google and I want to get into a bunch of those. ⁓ before we do that, let’s continue with the basics. I so I actually started working on this feature. Maybe people think it was in reaction to Google or something, but it wasn’t. We actually started working on this as soon as Chat TV came out. ⁓ to really initially focus on Wikipedia and helping, know, giving people better Wikipedia answers, which you mentioned, search exists now appears in about 25 % of searches, Wikipedia appears around about 10%. So, and we had gotten lots of feedback over the years that, hey, it’d be great, you’re showing me the beginning of Wikipedia, but it’d be great if you could just show me the answer from Wikipedia. And we had tried that in different ways and we accomplished that somewhat, but until LMS came along where we could really pull back the paragraphs of Wikipedia and ask the LMP to pull out the answer within that paragraph, which is much better than just showing the paragraph and making you find it. We weren’t really able to unlock search assist. So yeah, we started working on it right when ChatGPD came out and kind of rushed to Wikipedia. And then I know you got involved later. when we started adding lots of other sources. And as you mentioned, we’re trying to use the best sources we can. ⁓ But I’d say more broadly, given that it’s kind of a broader thing than Wikipedia now, what do you see the problem that it’s solving in search results, just kind of for at large? Like you mentioned, sometimes you put it on top, sometimes you put it on the bottom. Obviously, that’s a choice. we’re putting on top because we think it’s solving a search problem,Ewa So think the key problem is that it’s short that we’re solving with assist is that it shortens the path from when you know what you want to ask and you formulate a query and to actually finding what you’re looking for. And to your point, we’ve already been doing Wikipedia or other modules in the past and we’re still doing them for many of the searches. But Assist allows us to cover more of these informational queries, including the long tail ones, meaning people use different language to ask Search Engine about what they’re looking for. And with Assist, we’ve been able to understand more of these natural language queries or queries that really ever are asked only once to a Search Engine, which is a huge portion of search queries. And, but we still can understand them and can present an answer that is like good enough to answer what you’re really looking for. But also with the more button that you’ve already mentioned also allows you to dig deeper and get more information on demand while still keeping you in the search engine context. In the context that a lot of people are familiar with because we’ve been using it for years, years, some of us ever since they were born. And so it’s kind of like bridges the gap between the value that LLMs bring and how they can enrich the experience of finding information ⁓ without having to move to a totally different user interface, to move to more like conversational chat experiences. It’s still search results that are familiar. It’s the search results that these answers are grounded for. but we’re making use of this technology to present it in a more suitable way for larger volume of different types people ask search engine.Gabriel Yeah, and so maybe I summarize that way. It really is saving people time. And I think as a primary benefit, I think as a secondary benefit in aligning with our vision of Raise a Standout Trust Online is that we’re trying to ⁓ understand what is the best information in the search results and surface that for you in a concise way. ⁓ So that not only saves you time, but it on average should be giving you better information higher up on the page, ⁓ which is kind of really what you want in a search engine. And just to restate for people who really don’t want AI, you can turn it off. However, this is not to your point earlier, AI making up the answer. This is us grounding the answer on actual search pages that were crawling in real time to look for that answer for you. And then the sources are ⁓ annotated there, which you can click through ⁓ and both check and read more information because we’re only giving you a concise summary. So if you want more, you click through. ⁓ So with that in mind, how you mentioned the more button in the UX before we kind of dive into kind of differences. ⁓ What is the general user reaction been like over time with search assist?Ewa ⁓ So we’ve been getting a lot of really positive reactions from our users. Assist has been like one of the highest rated parts of search experience historically at DuckDuckGo. And ⁓ I think what people usually appreciate is both that it saves time, it gives this concise answer. The fact that it’s really concise and it’s not like taking over your search experience is just there when you need it but still doesn’t make it hard to get to organics if that’s what you’re looking for. It’s another thing that people have appreciated. ability to drill down to sources, as you’ve mentioned, is also something we’ve heard been ⁓ getting like really good reception. And we are using the feedback we’re getting from people a lot in improving assist. On one hand, that’s because we really don’t track our users. We have very little information about how people interact with our search results. So we really rely on when people make effort to click thumbs up, click thumbs down, leave some additional comment. We use this information both in automated way to improve our answers and also we really do read through them and take lessons and figure out how we can continue improving assist, which is for instance how we’ve gotten the more button.Gabriel Yeah, I mean, so that seems like a big difference from Google right there for what it’s worth. I mean, I guess I’m not inside Google, so I don’t know, but from reading comments on Hacker News and other places, it does not necessarily seem like they read every piece of feedback, ⁓ but we actually do. And so ⁓ that really is a distinction. ⁓ We mentioned some others too. ⁓ So I mentioned that it was optional. I think we should clarify now that it’s not just you can turn it on or off, which you can. But you can also change the frequency of when search assist appears. We have often and sometimes, as well as on demand. So you can basically make it so it doesn’t show up automatically, but if you want to click on it, you can still click the search assist button on the underneath the search box and it’ll show just for when you want it on demand. And if you really, really don’t want it, including not even seeing that button on the page, you can ⁓ get rid of that. So that’s another one.Ewa Yes.Gabriel Another one that you mentioned, so the conciseness, I think, you know, does a couple things. One, it means that the less information there is, the less kind of surface area there is for making stuff up or getting stuff wrong. ⁓ But also, what you had just mentioned, it just takes up less space on the page. So I think some complaints that people have about Google’s A.O. overviews is they really are just taking up. You can’t see the organic links, they’re taking up too much of the page. We’re really keeping it ⁓ tight. And the way we’re doing that is we’re kind of forcing it to be small, but also to your point, we have the more button there as an option, but we’re not starting out with that long explanation. We’re starting out with this ⁓ concise explanation. Is there anything else you want to highlight in terms of kind of differences between us and Google? ⁓ If not, I can probably come up with something else.Ewa Maybe like building on top of what you just talked about is I ⁓ think what what I can tell about our philosophy of building assist which I think also applies to the whole of search is that We like to give control to our to our users. We trust that they know they can own their experience, which is why we’re giving you search results, which some of it is assist. You get the organics, you get other modules, none of these experiences is like overly dominating the search results page. And you can kind of like choose your own adventure, which I think is... Again, I’m not in Google. I don’t know exactly how decisions are made in there, but from my observation is like different approach to how we give control versus deciding for the user what they should be seeing when they search for a specific topic query.Gabriel Yeah, that’s a great point. I mean, I would even build on that, which is we’ve also been giving control to publishers. There are some publishers who don’t ⁓ want to be part of AI results. ⁓ We are trying our best to make the click through rate actually pretty decent because we have a short summary. And so really, if you want more, you click through and the links are prominent. Like on Google, sometimes they’re hidden actually behind the click and on DuckDuckGo they’re not. More fundamentally in that if you do want to opt out, we have a kind of way for publishers to just opt out of the AI summaries ⁓ via robots.txt ⁓ and still appear totally fine in search results. Whereas Google has been trying to bundle those things together and basically force you to opt out of Google altogether. ⁓ So that’s another decently big difference in line with control. ⁓ OK, so yeah, what’s What’s next? What are the negative feedback complaints we’re getting? And what are we working on? Where are we going?Ewa Yes.Ewa So ⁓ one of the things that we continue working on and we will... is that we want to keep the high bar for answers quality. There are still cases where we get the answer wrong, it’s not incorrect or maybe the sources weren’t right or we misinterpret the query. The percent of these incorrect answers is really low but we, as I said, we want to really take correctness seriously. So we’re working to add even more loops, both with user feedback, observing the queries, especially the fresh ones, like trending topics. This is where information changes really often and we want assist to always give you the fresh and correct answer. So definitely answer quality is something that we will continue working on. ⁓ We also are moving to other languages besides English, as it has been available in English for a while already. That hasn’t been true for other languages, so it’s already available in Italy for some queries. We’re only rolling it down. You’ll start seeing it rather further down the page before we build enough confidence to show it on top of your results, but you can already start seeing it there. And we plan to roll out to ⁓ a few next languages which are gonna be Spanish, Dutch, French, German and we won’t stop there but this is like the current focus which ⁓ I’m personally excited about because yeah it’s...Gabriel sure a lot of team members are. have, I mean, this is for InterObject.co, we have people, I think, across like 30-something countries now, and a lot of them are not English as their first language. And I think they would prefer to have non-English ⁓ search assist answers. So that’s exciting.Ewa Absolutely, but also our users. I think we know that people all over the world are using DuckDuckGo search and I personally can’t wait to have them use assist and also get benefits of these short and concise answers. And we’re also looking into improving and expanding or continue improving the user experience of assist. We’ve been already mentioning the more button a few times. We know that there are sometimes different expectations people have when clicking more buttons. Sometimes it’s really you want to have the longer version of the answer, but sometimes it’s more like you want to do more information or additional thing that wasn’t mentioned, the concise answer. Or maybe you want to drill down, more like learn about related things. So we’re now looking into exploring these options and making sure that expand answers are really helpful depending on what you’re looking for.Gabriel Cool, I know we’re also always trying to speed things up. ⁓ reducing latency, getting answered faster, it’s always on the list. ⁓ Yeah, I guess the only thing else comes to mind is, you know, we’ve been, it might be worth pointing out is, which we mentioned in the past, that this actual ⁓ technology stack is completely independent from being in Microsoft. ⁓ You know, we’ve been kind of, We’re obviously working with the LM partner. We’re not building a foundational model ourselves, but the stack, ⁓ you know, is coming via our own crawling, ⁓ the web pages where we’re generating the answers. And that index is improving every day. And so we’re working on that as well. ⁓ And ultimately we hope to say more about that. ⁓ I think that’s it. I mean, the, ⁓ Anything else you want to add or do we hit everything for the basics?Ewa we hit everything that maybe one thing which is interesting to me, I don’t know if it’s going to be interesting to others, but ⁓ I think it’s also worth mentioning how we determine, for instance, answer correctness and how we’ve been actually using a lot of manual reviews of queries and answers within the team, which ⁓ I think is not obvious. Some people might assume that if you’re using AI generated also you also delegate to the AI to determine if it’s correct or not or if it includes enough details or not too much details. So the way we’ve been building assist is that we’ve done a lot of that manual judgment ourselves and we rely on these manually reviewed datasets. I’m pretty sure quite a few people in the team ⁓ might complain a lot about how tiresome and ⁓ maybe you it’s It’s not the most exciting work while you do it, but I think it’s extremely useful in really ensuring that these answers, when we say our correctness rate is high, this doesn’t mean that someone or AI tells us we’re doing a good job. It’s really, we’ve reviewed a huge, huge, huge data sets of queries and we retest them over time to ensure that this quality stays high.Gabriel Yeah ⁓Gabriel That’s good, that’s a way to end. I guess I have been forgetting to say, if you’re listening to this and you do have follow-up questions, email us. You can reply to the email that you get if you subscribe to us on Substack. Otherwise, we probably need to develop an email address that other people can send to us. So I’ll have to get back on that. But if you subscribe to the Substack, you can just reply to that email and it’ll come to us and we’ll get it for future episodes. So thank you everyone for coming on and thanks everyone for tuning in.Ewa Thanks, Gabriel. Thanks, everyone. 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, Gabriel (Founder) and Joe (Policy team) discuss why we donate, the types of organizations we donate to, and some examples of impact. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.Show notes: See our full list of donations here. Gabriel: Hello everybody, welcome back to DuckTales. I am Gabriel, the founder of DuckDuckGo. Today I have with me Joe, and we’re gonna talk about donations, but you want to start introducing Joe.Joe: Thanks Gabriel. ⁓ So I am the senior public policy manager for DuckDuckGo. ⁓ What does that mean? ⁓ It sort of means that ⁓ I’m sort of the person in DC who sort of tilts at windmills, talks to Congress, works with lawmakers, and otherwise tries to keep the rest of the company abreast of how the US government and states are ⁓ pushing different types of regulations, solving online privacy. ⁓ and trying to make the internet a better place for everybody.Gabriel: Cool, yeah, and there’s probably a lot of good feature episodes in all that, which is the main part of your A small of your job is you took over really running the process in which we make our donations every year. I realize it’s a small part of your job, but it’s important one, and I think important to our users, so you want to explain just kind of what that is?Joe: Yeah, no, and look, I guess I shouldn’t oversell it, but I actually think it’s a really impactful part of the job. ⁓ It’s really, I think, like, it’s both, and we can talk about this, humbling and satisfying to be able to sort of allocate money to causes that are out there to try and improve trust online. ⁓ I’m our, I guess our DRI, our directly responsible individual for our corporate donations. ⁓ And this has actually become a pretty elaborate internal process to look at a whole bunch of different organizations. Now, I already mentioned I’m in DC, so I think about civil society groups, the Electronic Frontier Foundations of the world. ⁓ But we actually, you know, we give to a whole lot of different entities and organizations, ⁓ you know, sort of open source technology groups, ⁓ online technology reporters. and other organizations that do really impactful journalism on technology and data privacy. ⁓ And so, you know, I think there’s always sort of a push and pull to try and convince you to give us more money to give out each year. ⁓ But, you know, we give out, you know, over a million dollars to, I think this year it was something like 29 different organizations. ⁓ And it’s a, you know, it’s a detailed process. We spend a lot of months just arguing amongst ourselves about how we should allocate that money. And we’re, you know, we have a bunch of different criteria for what goes into this. ⁓ But, you know, we’re trying to both provide impactful donations. And so that means we give to a lot of small groups. ⁓ We’re also trying to sort of ensure that, you know, these groups are not just like aligned with us on one or two things, but are really out there trying to make the internet a better place. I mean, you know, if anybody’s been watching DuckTales, I think everybody would realize that DuckTales Go is a pretty mission driven company. And we’ve got this goal of expanding trust online. And we can’t do that ourselves. And there are a lot of different entities out there in the United States and globally ⁓ that are playing a really important role making the internet more trustworthy. And so we’re constantly trying to find ⁓ new voices to elevate and new projects to support.Gabriel: Yeah, as completely slightly a tangent, but you mentioned it because this is inside dark echo. At dark echo, we have this concept of the DRI directly responsible individual. What that means is someone who owns something and. We have, as you might imagine, tons of processes internally, one of them being this art under nation’s process and every one of them has an owner. Um, and so, yeah, that’s just a little insight in baseball for us, but hundreds of those and Joe owns this process and it often gets handed, you know, over time that changes ownership, but, um, that really means taking ownership of it and kind of, um, driving it forward and seeing it to completion. Um,Joe: Thank you.Gabriel: But yeah, donations, I also see it as extremely key to our vision. So we actually started doing this a long time ago. ⁓ I think I have the, for anyone who wants to look at everything we’ve donated to, we have a page, ducktogo.com slash donations.Joe: Good, it’s good that you got the microsite out there, that’s important.Gabriel: I just went to it. Yeah. Yeah.Joe: YeahGabriel: lists, it literally lists everything we’ve donated to, you know, including this year, 2020, all the way back to, guess, the first year we did this was 2011, which is a long time ago. What I was going to say is directly related to what you said is that was right around the time when we, 2011 was the first year we had our first employee. It was me just before that. know, Cade came on and when we did that, that’s when we started laying out our vision, like explicitly our mission and vision. Um, and we, the vision in particular, rates of standard of trust online hasn’t changed since, and it’s not going to change, but it was, it was kind of tied to that. We always said, you know, We’re one company. I think it’s really like what you said. We can only do so much on our own. We have a much broader vision. How can we push that forward? Well, we can donate to other places that could really help. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah, I think it was in service of, to another one of your points, of making a bigger impact.Joe: Okay.Gabriel: And so like my original thought was the dollar amounts at the very beginning were very small because we were very small and had no real revenues or profits. So there wasn’t ⁓ much to give, but we figured out, you know, we still put aside money to try to do so. ⁓ And so when we were doing that, and I think some of this is carried through to today, we were really trying to find organizations that could really do a lot with a small donation, you know, like, ⁓ and that might’ve been. project where an extra few thousand dollars could really help. And when it came to now, like maybe we give 25,000 or something and that enables somebody to ⁓ spin up a project or create a, someone part-time to on something. I think those are the kinds of things that can really make an impact. ⁓ I think the reason for doing the thematic ones early on is, you know, just concentrating the small amount of money we have into one thing and hoping to make an actual on that thing. ⁓ Now the dollar amounts are greater but we’re still picking themes it’s just probably three or four themes broadly in donations. I mean that’s the way I look at it. Yeah.Joe: Yeah, yeah. mean, I think now we pretty much are settled on, I would say, open technology or improving internet technology efforts, ⁓ data privacy. And then over the past few years, as we’ve been increasingly concerned about fair competition in digital markets, that’s become a bigger chuck. ⁓ But those are sort of the three buckets that think we’ve sort of narrowed in on, at least since I’ve been in charge of this.Gabriel: Yeah, and the process has evolved. Why don’t you take us through kind of the current bones of the process as it stands today.Joe: Yeah, that’s a good question. And I think actually a good opportunity to encourage folks to reach out if they want. you know, we like, there’s a couple of us internally that try to do a, some time over the year just sort of monitoring what groups are working on, ⁓ what they’re doing, whether it’s, ⁓ you know, basically sort of a subjective assessment of how impactful they are. ⁓ And then we have, I think it’s usually about a three month process that we kick off in you know, early summer to just sort of figure out like generally what are we interested in supporting over the year. And I think things that I think it’s worth highlighting that, you know, A, we’re a pretty community driven company. We’re also a team member driven company. I think it’s been really rewarding to have just ⁓ colleagues suggest, you know, organizations I had never heard of and that gets in there. So, you know, We are very much open to new ideas ⁓ and we support organizations globally, so I’m sure there’s plenty of things we have not heard of. So we create like a giant list of organizations and then we put it into a little bit of a rubric ⁓ and basically ask a number of questions about what we think the organization can do in the next year, ⁓ what actually would be impactful. Your point is totally valid. We’ve given money to support things like organizations being able to train up an employee. you know, think as you well know, like going from one to two employees can be hugely impactful for certain organizations. We’ve also, ⁓ you know, our support has allowed certain organizations to offer like health insurance to employees, which is not the, you know, really sort of makes you realize how, you know, some money can go a long way in things that are not just related to core, ⁓ you know, tech. projects, but literally people’s day-to-day well-being. ⁓ So we have this sort of rubric involved, and then we narrow it down. So part of the issue is we’d like to have a diverse, both geographic and ideologically diverse group of organizations. ⁓ We also sort of, at this point, have standardized our donation buckets a little bit. ⁓ we also like to keep a similar number of organizations. ⁓ You know, we started with, I think, six maybe, and we’re up to 29. And it becomes, and I think I’m one of these people, I’d love to give to every organization that exists, but that...Gabriel: And what are the buckets to you mentioned buckets like what kind of our bucketsJoe: yeah, yeah, that’s good question. ⁓ So ⁓ right now we sort of give organizations $25,000, $50,000, and then $100,000. Now there are some exceptions to that, but that tends to be where the donations fall. ⁓ yeah, ⁓ part of this is a lot of people are involved, and I should say it takes a village. It’s not just the policy team, it’s the communications team. that work on things here. obviously have to get involved at some point. ⁓ I think it’s really important and they deserve all the credit in the world and maybe a DuckTales episode for themselves. Our finance team has to do a lot of stuff here and that’s like the nitty gritty paperwork and taxes and stuff that ⁓ is not super, well, it might be fun for them but it’s not as glamorous as the laudatory press releases we get from some of these groups. ⁓ We have changed over years when we have given donations. ⁓ In the past, we’ve tied it to Data Privacy Day in January. We’ve tied it ⁓ to Giving Tuesday after US Thanksgiving. ⁓ This year, we gave out our donations much earlier ⁓ in September. And part of that’s just because I’d actually love to ask you, I know we’ve tried to get our community involved. And I know we’ve tried to make donations a moment in time. But it’s not the most attractive story in a world where we’re dealing with AI regulations and ⁓ competition breakups. ⁓ So it is always a question of when is the time to announce this in a way that could actually be impactful. And I think that’s an open question we’ve struggled with.Gabriel: Yeah, I’ve never cracked that code either. ⁓ So I open to your ideas there and it may be as the case. Yeah, we’ve had, we wanted to kind of like batch it so we can put it on the microsite and be like, here’s everything we did. And so I know we’ve given earlier in the year to some organizations who kind of needed it then, but then we tell that the announcement. but yeah, maybe there’s another way to do it where we kind of trickle it in over the year.Joe: Yeah.Gabriel: or something, know? I have no idea.Joe: I mean, if anybody out there has ideas and wants to reach out on Reddit or social media, I’m here to facilitate that. I mean, guess I should also say, ⁓ we’re always trying to ensure that Gabriel’s email isn’t flooded with requests and demand. So, I mean, one of the reasons I’m here today is, you know, if you’re an organization or an entity or your project that you think, you know, is in line with improving standards of trust online, ⁓ Please reach out. I’m happy to give you more information, happy to add you to our list of folks that we consider in 2026. ⁓ But I think part of my job as the policy person at DuckDuckGo is really to serve as a point of contact. And I’m here to answer anyone’s questions if you want to reach out.Gabriel: Yeah, well, people may take you up on that. To forward that further, I would say another thing that kind of distinguishes us initially, and this is in service of making an impact, and I’m pretty sure we still do this too, is we’re not really tying the donations to anything. A lot of philanthropic organizations say... ⁓ have to use it for this project, has to be earmarked for this, to your point, ⁓ supporting the organization for health insurance. I think that’s fine with us. We’re looking for impactful organizations where the money can really make a big difference. But if that’s the thing that’s going to make the organization more impactful, that’s okay with us because we’re more about the organization doing the job that it’s set out to do, mission. We have our mission. We’re supporting the mission of the other organization. And we want the organizations to exist. And often to exist, you need to give, in this example, your members health insurance.Joe: Yeah, no, absolutely. mean, I would say that our donations have never really had any strings attached as far as I’ve been running them. ⁓ It actually leads to some interesting back and forths with groups. And this is relevant because I just had a conversation with them. So this year, we are actually giving some money to Consumers International ⁓ as part of their effort to kickstart basically a year-long process to build ⁓ ethical and privacy principles around agentic AI and AI privacy. ⁓ And so, you know, they approached us and really wanted to know what our involvement would be. And they were like, this would be a good thing for you guys to get involved with. And we’re like, sure, you here, here, like run with it. You don’t you don’t need ROK to come up with privacy principles. ⁓ You know, we support privacy generally. And if you guys come up with something that we can adopt that. that would be great, like, you know, it’s not like you need us to rubber stamp what a global consumer group wants to do on AI privacy. So, you know, that’s been another interesting example. And it is also like something I certainly appreciate is a number of the groups over the year like reach out and they want to like check in and they have a whole lot of stuff going on. Some of it super relevant to, you know, DuckDuckGo’s interests, some of it pretty far removed. ⁓ And it’s, least from my perspective, it’s a really interesting opportunity to get exposure to stuff that ⁓ doesn’t fit into, I think, the four corners of DuckDuckGo’s policy priorities.Gabriel: Yeah, that’s interesting. yeah, you mentioned them. Are there any other organizations you think we should highlight maybe that we’ve given to a lot over the years? I mean, the one that jumps out to me is EFF. I know many years given to them, given the tour, many ⁓Joe: Yeah, ⁓ mean the tour project was there from the beginning as far as I can tellGabriel: Right, yeah, I think it was. So yeah, I think you, I don’t know how many, do you have a count of like how many organizations we’ve given to?Joe: Yeah, well, ⁓ and I put this into Duck AI earlier today, so if it’s wrong, it’s not my fault. ⁓ So we have given to a little under, I think, 100 organizations total over the past 15 years.Gabriel: Okay. so, yeah, so there’s been a lot of different organizations if we’re doing about 30 a year, but yeah, there’s been some that have been there a lot. so like, know Tor, EFF, Signal over the last few years comes to mind. I’m not sure if any other ones you want to highlight or just from this year even, maybe we haven’t given it several years, but you just want to name a few.Joe: Yeah, well, you know, I mean, I think one thing that I think is worth highlighting is we have increasingly given to organizations that focus on competition policy. ⁓ So in that respect, I want to give a shout out to Public Knowledge, which is a group that we’ve funded considerably. I mean, ⁓ this is a policy plug less than a donation plug, but, ⁓ you know, there aren’t a lot of tech-focused groups that think about competition. ⁓ And Public Knowledge is one of the exceptions to that. And from our perspective, there’s a huge host of problems with that. Like when you have lots of lots of big companies, they don’t have an incentive to protect privacy. so ⁓ supporting groups that sort of work at that intersection of competition and privacy ⁓ has been increasingly important to us.Gabriel: Cool. Yeah, this has been great. Anything else you want to highlight that we maybe didn’t cover?Joe: man I probably should have a better answer for that. ⁓ mean, again, I... No, no, no. mean, look, I think there’s... One of the things I have learned at DuckDuckGo is that there are always ways to improve processes and we’ve talked a little bit about our process. We are always trying to figure out ways to be more, I think, transparent with groups that are interested in funding and want to know, you know...Gabriel: Well the answer could be we did a great job and we’ve covered all the bases so that’s it.Joe: why we’re not funding them. ⁓ And so, again, I’ll just say that I think I exist to be a resource for that. So if you’re interested in funding, ⁓ please reach out. And I guess I’d say as we try and make this more of an established process, the earlier that folks can do that, the better.Gabriel: Yeah, okay, that’s a good point. Thank you for doing that, too. I never want to say no to people, so I always findJoe: YeahGabriel: an awkward discussion. But yeah, there’s only so much.Joe: ⁓ we’ve had some interesting conversations with groups this year.Gabriel: Yeah. But thanks, Joe, for coming on. Yeah, reach out to Joe, ⁓ if you’re an organization. Otherwise, check out our donations page at stucco.com slash donations. Everything’s listed there back to 2011. And ⁓ otherwise, hope you tune in for the next episode. you. 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 (SVP, Product) and Zbig (Director, Talent) discuss our approach to hiring, and how it’s designed to reflect our unique, cross-functional and mostly async ways of working. Show notes: Check out our careers page and open positions here. 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. Hi, everyone. Welcome to DuckTales, ⁓ where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, our product updates, our approach to AI, or how we operate as a company, which is the zone that today’s episode will fall in. ⁓Zbig: Okay.Beah: introduce myself briefly. I’m Beah Burger-Lenahan. I lead the product team here at DuckDuckGo. And we have with me Zbig. Hey Zbig, do want to introduce yourself?Zbig: Yeah, of course. Hi, Beah. Hi, everybody. I’m Zbig. I’m on the Talent Acquisition team. I’ve been around for almost seven years now at DuckDuckGo, and I feel very privileged to have seen this amazing journey of us scaling the team from about 50 to over 350, where we are right now and I’m super excited to be here and talk about hiring.Beah: Awesome, thanks, the big. Yeah, so today we’re gonna talk about how we hire, what that process looks like, why, and so forth. Hopefully it’ll be interesting to everyone. ⁓ So maybe just to get started, can you kind of lay out at like the highest levels of our approach to hiring, what that process looks like?Zbig: course. Yeah. So I think at a, at a highest level, um, there is, you know, lot of intentionality and discipline to how we hire. So we would do that only when we have like a really clear and well articulated need. So when we’re scoping roles, right? Like we would want to deeply understand what the actual tangible problems are that we want that particular role to solve for us. And then we designed the hiring process to test for the skills, the competencies that are critical to being able to do that. So in practice, that means that we base that hiring process ⁓ largely on test projects ⁓ rather than interviews. Well, there are usually a couple of interviews in every process, but we definitely attach way more weight to test projects. We also tried to design that hiring process in way that ⁓ it’s truly like a two-way street and allows Canada to discover how we work. So, you know, they can make a well-informed decision at the end about whether or not this is good place for them. And I think one other thing worth highlighting ⁓ that comes out of this intentionality and discipline is the fact that, you know, never in the company history, we were forced to do any group layoffs. And when you look at the tech market these days, that’s very rare.Beah: Yeah, because we only hire people that we know we really need.Zbig: that will really advance the goals of the company, right?Beah: Yeah, got it. Okay, thanks. So let’s talk about the projects since they are, as you said, kind of the core of our process. Are these projects, do we expect people to do them for free?Zbig: Sure. Yeah. No, we offer payment, which is kind of like average bubbly, but it’s usually like anything from 50 to 100 US dollars per an estimated hour of work required to complete a project. These are, and this is just like recognize the time candidates put into those. These projects are always role specific and designed to simulate the actual work one would be doing on the job. You can complete them async on your own time. And I truly believe that allows candidates to demonstrate the best of their abilities without the typical pressure and stress of interviews. And also like when you think of the async format, that much more closely reflects how we work on a daily basis at DuckDuck. Because I think that probably like, I don’t know, 70, 80 % of collaboration here happens asynchronously. There are a few meetings throughout the week. And ⁓ we’ve picked this format for the hiring process very intentionally. There’s actual research behind that that proves that work samples, test projects that are role specific, they’re much less prone to bias and error than interviews. And what we found through that ⁓ is that they are great predictors of future success on the job. And when you look at our retention rate, that’s 95%. You know, our engagement scores are also very high, like I think 86 % way above market benchmarks for companies of our size and at our stage of growth. like there’s actual, you know, quantitative validation that this approach works very well for us.Beah: Yeah, is it challenging to get people to commit to doing these projects? It can be a bit of time.Zbig: It is one of the bigger challenges of our hiring process because these test projects can take anything from like three, four hours up to 15 and in some cases maybe 20. And we typically expect folks to complete two of those, two sometimes three. So that’s like a time investment of about 25, 30 hours in test projects. I think we do our best to really to adjust to Canada’s availability. There’s like from our side, there’s no pressure on like when exactly they should be starting on those. They can plan ahead, set that time aside. If they need an extension, they can just let us know. And we usually have no problem to grant that because we understand that different things can come up in life that could derail their plans. So So we really try to adjust our pacing to candidates, be very flexible with those timeframes to ⁓ make it feasible for them.Beah: Got it. I’m shifting gears a little bit. So where do we hire in the world and why?Zbig: Hmm. So we hire globally though, not everywhere. We have like a selection of countries where that we’ve decided scale to based on like ⁓ a pretty nuanced estimate on the available town pools, how those relate to our needs, ⁓ how easy it is also to like scale within them from the administrative financial logistics perspective, perspectives, but we are able to hire across tens of countries around the the globe. And I think that’s awesome because that gives us access to amazing talent ⁓ that often when you think of some of these countries, there aren’t that many opportunities to work on something of a comparable scale that Go offers. So we’re way more competitive there, right? And we’re truly... I’m actually in Krakow in Poland and we have a pretty pretty big contingent here, like I think one of the fourth, fifth biggest representations geographically across the company with over 20 people. yeah, there’s definitely a great advantage of this remote setup that enables that. ⁓ And I think also what makes it possible is the fact that as a company, we’re designed from ground up for full remote collaboration, right? When you think of the companies that were switching to remote during the pandemic, that often didn’t work out and many of them are now calling people to go back to the office because they didn’t really have the right processes and culture to enable effective collaboration. I think that’s definitely not the case here.Beah: Where are you located today?Zbig:Beah: Yeah. Yeah. I will say, mean, the remote ⁓ employee base has challenges for sure, and it has a lot of upsides as well. I think for me, like one kind of just fun perk of it is that it’s cool to know people from all over the world. ⁓Zbig: yeah, for sure.Beah: you know, when I think about like traveling I think, ooh, like who can I go see?Zbig: Yeah. And also when you think of like, we’re building a global product or a set of global products, right? And I think it’s invaluable to have people from different geographies representing different cultures and perspective, because that helps us inform like how we can be building those products for a broader audience that really ⁓ meets their needs and solves jobs for them.Beah: Yeah, makes sense. So you mentioned ⁓ one of the challenges of our hiring process is getting people to commit the time to the projects. Are there any other significant challenges?Zbig: Mm. Yeah. I think the probably the biggest one is related to how we work. Cause as you know, we’re pretty uniquely organized over here. There’s no middle management. There’s no like separate project management function. And in practice, that means that everybody really is expected to be able to scope, propose and execute projects. Sometimes that means, you know, managing a cross-functional project team and that skillset is not that easy to get on top of the functional expertise, Like functional competencies. So ⁓ we often end up hiring, you know, we do most of our hiring in engineering and at a senior individual contributor level, like senior engineer, and we often end up hiring folks, you know, performing these like more senior leadership related responsibilities elsewhere, sometimes even like holding more senior titles than what, we have on the job description. Disclaimer though, don’t use job titles internally. We don’t want them to get out of picking the best solution or going in the most optimal route. We try not to make decisions based on authority. And that’s worked well for us, I think, over the years.Beah: . . I’m curious. I’ve never asked you this question or I don’t know the answer. Do candidates find it appealing that we don’t use titles internally or does it put some people off?Zbig: Thank I think many of them, I think many of them do, and they do highlight, well, we get a lot of that feedback from candidates in the hiring process, but some of them do raise it as an objection. And I get it. you know, I think typically on the market, there’s a lot of weight attached to job titles, right? Because they demonstrate certain progression throughout one’s career. And some candidates decide not to give that up, which I totally get, right? Like if someone is already like, I don’t know, staff. engineer, principal engineer, and the max they can get here with us is a senior level position. ⁓ I understand why, you know, a certain percentage of people would not want to do that, right? But in practice, though, like for people who really care primarily about the ability to make impact in the org, that title here, it doesn’t... doesn’t matter really, right? Like it does not give you more authority or impact in any way.Beah: Yeah. So I think like in our conversation so far, a lot of it has been about this like very particular point of view that DuckDuckGo has that ⁓ may be different from a lot of companies, a lot of hiring processes.Zbig: Mm-hmm.Beah: ⁓ But my sense is also that we have evolved, like while we have a very particular point of view, it is not a stringent one that has been the same for years and years and years, like it’s evolved quite a bit. Any significant changes in your time here that you think are worth calling out?Zbig: yeah, yeah, of course. And I think at a higher level even like we continue to iterate and improve all of our processes, right? ⁓ And that applies to hiring as well. So like one of the big things we had in the past was the so-called internal contracting period when, you know, once you completed the hiring process, we didn’t bring you in full time, but we asked you to do some sort of a part-time internal contract. you know, do some you know, a single sometimes maybe two projects as part of the team, but not working with us full time. So usually people, I did that too. It wasn’t the best experience. So the first thing I did after joining was to look at the data of like, okay, how many people going through that actually join, right? Like how big of a filter is that in our hiring process? And what it turned out was that, well, we actually bring in everybody. Like there was, think one exception that that we weren’t even like sure about going into that internal contracting period. But the data told the story that, well, the hiring process itself is such a good predictor already. We don’t need that. And that was a, I think that was a great change because it enabled us to engage with people who otherwise would not be able to invest that time on top of their jobs or personal obligations, right? So that was definitely a big enabler in accelerating the pace of hiring.Beah: I did that. ⁓ back. Got it. So we did that, that was like inspired by you not having a good experience, like the con, you being kind of put off by the.Zbig: Not just me, There was a broader, like my experience was one of the data points, but there was a broader discussion with leadership where, you know, we looked at like, okay, how scalable is that? Like we’re hiring maybe 20, 30 people per year. We were when I was joining, but we were looking at increasing that substantially, right? So it wasn’t a great experience for candidates. wasn’t a great experience for people internally. Ask to oversee those internal. contracting period, so there were multiple arguments for making that change. But only when we examined the data, we knew that, OK, that’s up. It doesn’t make sense to be doing that anymore.Beah: Mm. Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned we were hiring maybe 20, 30 people a year at that point. Can you talk about what our hiring volume looks like now?Zbig: Yeah, so it’s our record year this year. So I’m super pumped about that. We are on 80 hires this year, ⁓ which is absolutely amazing. Yeah, yeah, there may be a couple more. So we’ll see. ⁓ But yeah, it’s really great to see that growth. And we’re bringing in some amazing people. So yeah, that’s super cool.Beah: And we got 2 months left to go. Yeah, do you think we, over the process of the last few years, our ability to make the right selection in terms of both people that will be successful here and that will be happy and thrive and want to stick around has improved?Zbig: I think so, yeah, and quite considerably. ⁓ So we were looking to tighten the feedback loop for new hires to get an even better sense of how fast new hires are reaching full productivity. But when we look at the data, ⁓ the success rate is very high. And ⁓ we rarely have instances of new hires failing to meet expectations, which is another benefit of this highly disciplined, intentional approach. ⁓Beah: Yeah, you mentioned 95 % retention. Yeah, that seems very good.Zbig: retention. Yeah, that’s continued over the years, right? Like when we scaled from 50 to over 350, we’ve managed to maintain that. And I think we’re only getting better.Beah: Yeah, I remember when I was in a much loosey-gooseier process to be hired at DuckDuckGo seven-ish years ago. was talking to Gabriel and I was kind of asking him about what it’s like to work at DuckDuckGo and he was like, mean, nobody’s really left in the last four years. It wasn’t exactly what he said, but was something like that. Basically nobody had left in years, maybe like one or two people. ⁓Zbig: Right. Later. Yeah, yeah,Beah: Okay, one more question for you and then ask if you have anything else you want to say before we close. what, I’m curious what proportion, where are coming from? ⁓ What portion of hires are referrals versus inbound?Zbig: So the vast majority comes through inbound, and that’s a combination of our Curious website and ads we post on LinkedIn and other job boards. But Curious is still, I think, the main contributor there. It’s, I think, 64 % for inbound total. And that makes sense, right? We have such a big user base where pretty popular among engineers. A lot of our hires are actual users of our products, which is amazing because then they contribute with their feedback and thoughts to helping us improve our products. ⁓ Similar to other companies, ⁓ the second best source of hires is referrals. I think a quarter of our hires ⁓ come from referrals and ⁓ that’s always been a great source also in terms of the retention and performance of these folks. So we’re trying ⁓ to leverage that as much as possible.Beah: Also, just interject that when we hire people who are not users of our product. They’re also really great at helping make the product better because my question is, why aren’t you a user? What’s stopping you? I mean, we expect everybody to use our products once they’re here, but it’s sort of nice to have people who maybe like weren’t dedicated, loyal users ahead of time because they maybe have a different basis of comparison and also reflect a large number of users that we would like to ⁓ list.Zbig: For sure. Of course. Yeah. I think. Exactly. I think it’s great to have both of these perspectives, right? ⁓ Because the non-users, they usually bring a completely new set of eyes and views on our product offering. So yeah, I think we’re really contributing from having people from both of these poles.Beah: Yeah, what anything else that you want to share before we wrap, Sabing?Zbig: I think, yeah, I mean, like one other interesting thing is that it does take a lot of effort to hire, you know, and we have multiple people from our functional teams, engineering, other teams too, involved in the hiring process to help with test project reviews, to help with interviews. And perhaps for this, I looked up the data and, you know, only this year we’ve done over 2300 project reviews and 790 almost 800 interviews. So yeah, it’s a huge effort that goes into that. But we honestly think it’s worth it. Like getting hiring right and making sure that people who bring in will make a positive impact that will be happy here. I strongly believe this is one of the most powerful levers we can be pulling as a company. I think that effort is totally worth it. And of course, we continue to look at how we can optimize and improve the efficiency of the hiring process so it’s less of an effort. But that’s a continuous process,Beah: . Okay. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you, Zabig. That’s all I got.Zbig: Awesome. Well, super happy to be here and thank you for this. That’s been great.Beah: Alright, see you later!Zbig: See ya. 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 (Product) and Max (Frontend) discuss cookie pop-up protection, why our solution is uniquely private, and the feedback loops we use to help us reject cookies across more of the sites you visit. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.Beah: Hello and welcome to DuckTales where we go behind the scenes with 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 and our approach to AI or how we operate as a company. In this case, today we’re going to be talking about a feature that I dearly love.⁓ cookie pop-up protection with ⁓ Max here. So let me just do some quick introductions, I guess, before I’m kind of getting a little ahead of myself. I’m Bea Berger-Lenahan. I lead the product team here at Tech Tech Go. And I’m going to be asking Max a few questions. Max, would you like to introduce yourself?Max: Yeah, sure. Hey, ⁓ my name is Max. I am an engineer in the front-end team at DuckDuckGo. Been here for about three years, a little more. Yeah, I’m excited to talk about cookie pop-up protection.Beah: Awesome. Thank you, Max. We’re glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re here. ⁓ So first, just tell me, tell all of us a little bit about what cookie pop-up protection is, how it works.Max: Yeah, so this is the ⁓ feature in our browsers that handles cookie pop-up for you. ⁓ And in a nutshell, it... ⁓ that’s a good question. ⁓ I mean, I think most people have seen a cookie pop-up, but yeah, the definitions vary, but we’re talking about these...Beah: What’s a cookie pop-up first? HahahaMax: dialogues that websites show you on the first visit that typically tell you something about their data sharing practices and the use of cookies and similar technologies. And sometimes they give you a way to opt out of some optional tracking ⁓ or cookies. And that’s what we’re actually doing. We’re automating, ⁓ basically clicking reject buttons for you or whatever it takes to...toggle all these little checkboxes and saving the settings. ⁓ I could demo it if that’s okay. ⁓ So let me share my screen. ⁓Beah: That’d be great.Max: So for the sake of the demo, I’ve disabled the feature in the settings right now. It’s enabled by default, ⁓ but I’m just going to show you. ⁓ So if we go to Sky Scanner, for example, and I’m in the Netherlands, so you see a Dutch version, but there is this huge cookie pop-up ⁓ when you load the page. And if I enable the feature, cookie pop-up protection and reload the page, you’re not gonna see this pop up anymore. And what happened, and then there will be a ⁓ little notification in the address bar. And if you drill down, you’ll see the explanationBeah: Okay. Okay.Max: what happened. But basically what happened behind the scenes is we clicked on the reject button rejecting the cookies automatically. And that’s why we call it cookie pop-up protection. ⁓ So for us, this is a privacy protection feature because it actually ⁓ chooses the most private option for you, which is not always easy. Let’s see.Beah: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if we have data on this, but I imagine very few people are willing to go into, you know, click the option to actually adjust ⁓ settings and start toggling things on and off on the regular.Max: Yeah, ⁓ that’s for sure. So ⁓ some pop-ups can be really tricky to opt out. ⁓ You would need to go to click, Settings and then toggle a bunch of check boxes and then click Save. This can become... Like most people, think they just click Accept button. ⁓ And ⁓ yeah, this is of course not good for your privacy. ⁓ So we help...Beah: Yeah.Max: getting through these dark patterns.Beah: Yeah, makes sense. why did we build this? What’s the origin story?Max: Yeah, so ⁓ like many other features that go, it started as like a hack project, which is when someone goes in and tries to tackle the problem in a couple of days. And ⁓ of course, cookie pop-ups are universally annoying and wanted to do something about it. ⁓ And we built some prototypes. And then eventually we built a feature on top of a ⁓ prior work of my colleague, Sam Macbeth, who... ⁓ So we have an open source library that does most of the ⁓ things that we... ⁓ And we ⁓ use it and it powers all our... ⁓ This feature in all our browsers.Beah: Nice. ⁓ Max, did I cut off your demo? Did you want to show anything else there?Max: No, I’m trying to stop presenting it just doesn’t work. I’m clicking the buttonBeah: Oh, okay. Alright, I was just worried I cut you off. Alright, we’ll see if it responds at some point. So, okay, so just to recap, ooh, there it goes, okay. Just to recap, we are a, removing the annoyance of you’re like trying to go to Skyscanner, I don’t know what that is, you’re trying to go to Skyscanner and instead of getting whatever it is that’s on Skyscanner, you’re getting this big like notification in your face, we’re making that go away and we’re going in and we’re changing the settings to be more privacy respecting. That sounds great. What’s the downside?Max: Correct. And that’s, so like ⁓ this ⁓ approach actually is actually quite intentional, right? So as I mentioned this, we’re trying to maximize user privacy and ⁓ because there are other solutions on the market that do like ranging from clicking accept button, which is not acceptable for us. But also ⁓ there’s another approach of like preventing the interaction. And for us, this was very important to do it this way, to actually actively opt out because, well, first of all, ⁓ this is like the only way to opt out of ⁓ server side tracking we know of. ⁓ the second, it gives a clear signal to the website through the official channels.Max: And then finally, in some legislations, it’s actually the only way to opt out. So for example, in California, they can sell your data by default unless you click on the button. So ⁓ yeah, we think that as long as the site is compliant with the law, this approach is better for privacy. ⁓ And if it’s not compliant, we still have our tracker blocking and other privacy protections to fall back to. And so this is of course, so speaking of challenges, ⁓ this is a bit more involved than just, you know, blocking some requests to or blocking the pop-ups from loading. ⁓And so it needs a bit more effort because we actually need to automate each and every pop-up vendor. So it takes a bit more effort. But yeah, this is something we chose to do. I think we, for a while now, we’ve covered most of the, all of the major pop-up vendors, which is like 80, 90 % of top sites in Europe and the US.Beah: So that’s roughly the percent of cookie pop-ups that we think we’re successfully blocking at this point.Max: Yes, so that is 80 or 90 % of all pop-ups that you see on the top sites are handled. And one of the biggest challenges is this long tail of sites, because of course, no one visits just the top sites. And like, each of us has this one site that no one else visits.Beah: Mm-hmm. Okay.Max: And yeah, this is something we’ve been focusing on lately. We’re trying to ⁓ experiment in with automated approaches and using AI as well. And we’ve had some good success in the past months with it. So I think we’re gonna ramp up the this long tail coverage in the coming weeks and months. Yeah, andBeah: And how are you finding those? Do you want to talk about like how your finding those sites, which includes internal reporting, right?Max: Yeah, so we have a few different ⁓ feedback loops, as I say. of course, we have ⁓ our own crawling. So we ⁓ regularly crawl top sites ⁓ and trying to detect new pop-ups and handle them. ⁓ Then we have user reports, ⁓ breakage reports, and just user feedback reports. that we have special systems that filter out and surface the reports related to cookie pop-ups. And we also have very active internal reporting, which is DuckDuckGo employees who go above and beyond and just report new sites to us. is a very important source of feedback because we can get back to those people and verify.Beah: Who’s the number one reporter of cookie pop us.Max: the number one is Gabe. ⁓ So our CEO, he’s like, I think it’s fair to say that half of all the internal reports come from him. I have no idea how he does it.Beah: Hahaha I know. Yeah, sometimes I think maybe I can catch him, but I don’t know. I don’t know that I can. ⁓ So if a user watching this encounters a cookie pop-up, what should they do? How should they report it?Max: Yeah.⁓ So it depends on what kind of user there are. Like the easiest thing would be to send the feedback through the app. We have this ⁓ feature. Or if something actually doesn’t work, then feel free to send the breakage report, site breakage report at this. But if you’re actually a developer, thenThis whole thing is open source. And we welcome external contributions. You can go to GitHub, ⁓ find this library, called AutoConsent, and file some issues or even pull requests. This is always welcome. And we’ve had some external contributions before ⁓ from also other companies who are using this library. It’s not only ⁓ used in DuckDuckGo apps. ⁓ So yeah, if you’re that person, we’ll be happy to.Beah: Nice. So to recap, have to be, you only get this feature if you’re using our browser. If you’re using search and you click in another browser and you click on a search result and you land on a page with a cookie pop-up, we can’t really do anything to help you there, much as we’d love to. So you got to install our browser. But if you are using our browser on mobile or desktop, you can go into the menu and there’s a send feedback button and That’s a good way, like we actually read those, so please do send that feedback and we will try to fix it.Max: Yes, that’s right. So make sure to mention clearly that this is about cookie pop-up not being handled or some issue with cookie pop-ups and then we will see it.Beah: You can say, dear Max, please fix this cookie pop-up. But you have to be polite, obviously. Awesome. All right, before we wrap, Max, is there anything else that you want to add that we haven’t touched on?Max: Yeah That’s a possibility. ⁓ No, really just I’m excited ⁓ to spread awareness of this feature because ⁓ you know when it works and it does work you don’t notice it so anything we can do to ⁓ let people know that this exists and that it actually ⁓ helps.Beah: Yeah, here, here, the time when I notice it is when I go into other browsers to test things or experiment with something and I get all these cookie pop-ups. And I’m in the US, so I’m sure it’s worse if you’re in Europe, ⁓ and I’m just like, how do you live with this? So, and I scurry back to our browser. Awesome, well, thank you so much, Max. It’s been great learning a little bit more about cookie pop-up protection. Appreciate your time.Max: Yeah, thank you for having me. 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