So you won’t be able to hold longer conversations with it, like you can with ChatGPT. In addition, the feature can’t answer follow-up questions. The other problem is that the feature is currently restricted to Wikipedia entries that are “at most a few weeks old,” preventing it from being useful on current events. That said, DuckDuckGo is warning users that DuckAssist can still generate mistakes. “Think questions like ‘what is a search engine index?’ rather than more subjective questions like ‘what is the best search engine?’” “For this initial trial, DuckAssist is most likely to appear in our search results when users search for questions that have straightforward answers in Wikipedia,” CEO Gabriel Weinberg wrote in a post. Wikipedia is also known to supply largely reliable information that’s frequently updated by users. The company is doing so to prevent DuckAssist from “hallucinating” or making up the answer, and to cut down on the potential for spreading misinformation. But for now, DuckAssist’s scope has been confined to only citing content from encyclopedia sites Wikipedia and Brittanica. The approach could kill off traditional search results, like Microsoft is starting to do with the ChatGPT-powered Bing.

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