Duck Tales: Delight at DuckDuckGo — and why we’ve created 350+ versions of our mascot (Dax the Duck) (Episode 4)

15 Oct 2025 · 23 min

Episode Duck Tales: Delight at DuckDuckGo — and why we’ve created 350+ versions of our mascot (Dax the Duck) (Episode 4)

0:00 23:04

In this episode, Gabriel (founder) and Beah (VP, Product) discuss functional and non-functional product delight, how we’ve created 350+ versions of our mascot (and counting), and why AI is so bad at adding mustaches to Ducks.

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GabrielHello again, welcome to Duck Tales. ⁓ I think this is gonna be episode four. Hopefully it’s getting better. Today I am not interviewing Beah. Beah’s actually gonna interview me about a feature that’s fun that I think you’ll enjoy. But Beah, you wanna introduce yourself?

BeahSure. I’m Beah. I’m on the product team here at DuckDuckGo. Been here about six years. So seen a lot of things that have happened in recent DuckDuckGo product history. I, Delight is a favorite topic, a theme of mine. So I’m glad to be doing this conversation.

GabrielYes, indeed. Yes, speaking of the light, my favorite dog is behind you. Because I don’t have a dog. Well, I don’t have a dog, and it’s the dog I interact with most. Friday.

BeahHe’s your favorite. Certainly the one that attacks you the most, playfully attacks you the most. Yeah. Yes, that’s that’s Friday, everyone. He is usually not so low energy as he looks right now.

GabrielThat’s true. Yeah. The bar might be low. But yes, so I forgot to say DuckTales is obviously inside DuckDuckGo, behind the scenes kind of information about things we’re doing and how the company works and features we’re building and all that kind of stuff. ⁓ And as you noted, we have a delightful feature ⁓ that we’d like to talk about today. But I worked on it, it was actually part of Hack Days. We had a previous episode, it was also a feature came out of Hack Days. But yeah, shoot some questions at me and I will respond.

BeahSure. Tell us the origin, Gabriel. How did you come to decide to work on this?

GabrielYes, so what are we talking about? First of all, if you ⁓ search some special words, often characters like Spider-Man, Batman kind of thing, ⁓ the logo, our logo, Dax the Duck for those people don’t know, will change and he will be costumed ⁓ in that character ⁓ in the little logo on the search engine. We actually did this a long time ago. So we used to do like our version of Google doodles or whatever on the homepage. Maybe like literally 15 years ago at this point, ⁓ up until maybe 2012 ish. ⁓ We stopped doing it because it was hard to do. It took a lot of time to make the, make the especially logos. It also confused a lot of people because we put it up in like kind of random situations, like someone may have died or hollowed something and people who didn’t know about that person or holiday were just like what what what is going on with this but a lot of people really liked it and especially liked just the idea and the fun I would call delight as we’re gonna get to the the changing logo and that just the funness of dressing up a character ⁓ and I also am in that category so I’ve been wanting to bring this back for like 10 years but had no great way to do it

⁓ And then enter, enter AI. I thought that AI could be useful ⁓ making these specialty logos in some way. ⁓ When I first tried it, it was not, and I tried different versions of image models. But then finally I was hack days a few months ago, got it to work. ⁓ And so now we’ve been making them.

BeahOkay. Okay.

GabrielOne of suggestions of the community and team members and putting them up as Easter eggs. Yeah.

BeahDo you want to just say what hack days is for anybody who doesn’t know.

GabrielYeah, so Hack Days is every quarter, anyone who wants to participate in the company, and we’re about 300 people at this point, maybe 350 or something, can get together and create work on anything they want, really. It often is like features, ideas, and maybe designer, engineer, new, don’t have to be a product person, but they…

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