DuckDuckGo Web Search

Private web search using DuckDuckGo API for tracker-free information retrieval.

Core Features

• Privacy-focused search (no tracking)
• Instant answer support
• Multiple search modes (web, images, videos, news)
• JSON output for easy parsing
• No API key required

Quick Start

Basic Web Search

import requests

def search_duckduckgo(query, max_results=10):
    """
    Perform DuckDuckGo search and return results.

    Args:
        query: Search query string
        max_results: Maximum number of results to return (default: 10)

    Returns:
        List of search results with title, url, description
    """
    url = "https://api.duckduckgo.com/"
    params = {
        "q": query,
        "format": "json",
        "no_html": 1,
        "skip_disambig": 0
    }

    response = requests.get(url, params=params)
    data = response.json()

    # Extract results
    results = []

    # Abstract (instant answer)
    if data.get("Abstract"):
        results.append({
            "type": "instant_answer",
            "title": "Instant Answer",
            "content": data["Abstract"],
            "source": data.get("AbstractSource", "DuckDuckGo")
        })

    # Related topics
    if data.get("RelatedTopics"):
        for topic in data["RelatedTopics"][:max_results]:
            if isinstance(topic, dict) and topic.get("Text"):
                results.append({
                    "type": "related",
                    "title": topic.get("FirstURL", "").split("/")[-1].replace("-", " ").title(),
                    "content": topic["Text"],
                    "url": topic.get("FirstURL", "")
                })

    return results[:max_results]

Advanced Usage (HTML Scraping)

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

def search_with_results(query, max_results=10):
    """
    Perform DuckDuckGo search and scrape actual results.

    Args:
        query: Search query string
        max_results: Maximum number of results to return

    Returns:
        List of search results with title, url, snippet
    """
    url = "https://duckduckgo.com/html/"
    params = {"q": query}

    headers = {
        "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36"
    }

    response = requests.post(url, data=params, headers=headers)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, "html.parser")

    results = []
    for result in soup.find_all("a", class_="result__a", href=True)[:max_results]:
        results.append({
            "title": result.get_text(),
            "url": result["href"],
            "snippet": result.find_parent("div", class_="result__body").get_text().strip()
        })

    return results

Search Operators

DuckDuckGo supports standard search operators:

Search Modes

Web Search

Default mode, searches across the web.

search_with_results("machine learning tutorial")

Images Search

def search_images(query, max_results=10):
    url = "https://duckduckgo.com/i.js"
    params = {
        "q": query,
        "o": "json",
        "vqd": "",  # Will be populated
        "f": ",,,",
        "p": "1"
    }

    response = requests.get(url, params=params)
    data = response.json()

    results = []
    for result in data.get("results", [])[:max_results]:
        results.append({
            "title": result.get("title", ""),
            "url": result.get("image", ""),
            "thumbnail": result.get("thumbnail", ""),
            "source": result.get("source", "")
        })

    return results

News Search

Add !news to the query:

search_duckduckgo("artificial intelligence !news")

Best Practices

Query Construction

Good queries:

• "DuckDuckGo API documentation" 2024 (specific, recent)
• site:github.com openclaw issues (targeted)
• python machine learning tutorial filetype:pdf (resource-specific)

Avoid:

• Vague single words ("search", "find")
• Overly complex operators that might confuse results
• Questions with multiple unrelated topics

Privacy Considerations

DuckDuckGo advantages:

• ✅ No personal tracking
• ✅ No search history stored
• ✅ No user profiling
• ✅ No forced personalized results

Performance Tips

1. Use HTML scraping for actual results - The JSON API provides instant answers but limited result lists
2. Add appropriate delays - Respect rate limits when making multiple queries
3. Cache results - Store common searches to avoid repeated API calls

Error Handling

def search_safely(query, retries=3):
    for attempt in range(retries):
        try:
            results = search_with_results(query)
            if results:
                return results
        except Exception as e:
            if attempt == retries - 1:
                raise
            time.sleep(2 ** attempt)  # Exponential backoff

    return []

Output Formatting

Markdown Format

def format_results_markdown(results, query):
    output = f"# Search Results for: {query}\n\n"

    for i, result in enumerate(results, 1):
        output += f"## {i}. {result.get('title', 'Untitled')}\n\n"
        output += f"**URL:** {result.get('url', 'N/A')}\n\n"
        output += f"{result.get('snippet', result.get('content', 'N/A'))}\n\n"
        output += "---\n\n"

    return output

JSON Format

import json

def format_results_json(results, query):
    return json.dumps({
        "query": query,
        "count": len(results),
        "results": results,
        "timestamp": datetime.now().isoformat()
    }, indent=2)

Common Patterns

Find Documentation

search_duckduckgo(f'{library_name} documentation filetype:md')

Recent Information

search_duckduckgo(f'{topic} 2024 news')

Troubleshooting

search_duckduckgo(f'{error_message} {tool_name} stackoverflow')

Technical Comparison

search_duckduckgo('postgresql vs mysql performance 2024')

Integration Example

class DuckDuckGoSearcher:
    def __init__(self):
        self.session = requests.Session()
        self.session.headers.update({
            "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36"
        })

    def search(self, query, mode="web", max_results=10):
        """
        Unified search interface.

        Args:
            query: Search query
            mode: 'web', 'images', 'news'
            max_results: Maximum results

        Returns:
            Formatted results as list
        """
        if mode == "images":
            return self._search_images(query, max_results)
        elif mode == "news":
            return self._search_web(f"{query} !news", max_results)
        else:
            return self._search_web(query, max_results)

    def _search_web(self, query, max_results):
        # Implementation
        pass

    def _search_images(self, query, max_results):
        # Implementation
        pass

Resources

Official Documentation

• DuckDuckGo API Wiki: https://duckduckgo.com/api
• Instant Answer API: https://duckduckgo.com/params
• Search Syntax: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/

References

• HTML scraping patterns for result extraction
• Rate limiting best practices
• Result parsing and filtering