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: