duckduckgo

name	duckduckgo
description	Searches DuckDuckGo using the HTML endpoint (default, html→markdown via scrapling) and JSON API (--format json), returning clean markdown results, quick answers, abstracts, result links, and related topics. Use when performing web searches from the terminal, fetching Wikipedia-style summaries for a topic, or gathering search results into clean LLM context.
license	MIT
author	Tangled <[e-mail]>
version	0.1.0
tags	["web-search","web search","duckduckgo"]
category	web
external_references	["http://api.duckduckgo.com/","https://duckduckgo.com/"]

DuckDuckGo Public APIs

Overview

DuckDuckGo provides two public, undocumented endpoints for programmatic search:

• HTML Endpoint (/html/, default) — Returns full HTML search results page, automatically converted to clean markdown. Default format is html with scrapling backend for anti-bot evasion and native .md output.
• JSON API (api.duckduckgo.com) — Returns structured data including Wikipedia-style abstracts, infoboxes, definitions, answer results, and related topics. Access via --format json. Reliable for automated use with no authentication required.

Both endpoints accept a q parameter for the search query. Always URL-encode the query string.

When to Use

• Performing quick web searches from the terminal or scripts
• Fetching Wikipedia-style summaries and infoboxes for a topic
• Extracting structured search data (abstracts, related topics, result links) into LLM context
• Building search pipelines with pipe chaining
• When you need privacy-respecting search without API keys

Format × Backend Matrix

Format	scrapling (default)	curl	wget
html / markdown (default)	Native .md via --ai-targeted + --css-selector '.web-result'	Raw HTML → extract .web-result → pandoc → markdown	Raw HTML → extract .web-result → pandoc → markdown
json	Falls back to curl/wget (scrapling breaks JSON)	Raw JSON as-is	Raw JSON as-is

• html / markdown (default): Scrapling provides native .md output with anti-bot evasion and --css-selector '.web-result' for targeted extraction. curl/wget fetch raw HTML, extract only .web-result elements via python3 html.parser, then convert to markdown via pandoc.
• json: Always uses curl or wget. Scrapling transforms content and breaks JSON parsing.
• --pretty flag prettifies JSON output through jq ..