Web Search (DuckDuckGo)

Web Search (DuckDuckGo) — No API Key Required

Search the web using DuckDuckGo's public API and get clean, structured JSON results. No API key, no OAuth, no rate limit headaches. Returns title, URL, snippet, domain, and rank position for every result. Works in both web and news search modes. Built for AI agents, LLM pipelines, and automated research workflows.

Why This Actor

Most web search APIs require API keys, credit card billing, or impose strict quotas. This actor uses DuckDuckGo's public search interface — available without authentication, no per-query cost, and globally accessible. The output is clean JSON that plugs directly into LangChain tools, OpenAI function calls, or any data pipeline.

Features

• No API key required — zero setup friction
• Web and news modes — standard organic results or recent news articles
• Clean structured output — title, URL, snippet, domain, rank per result
• Region localization — localize results to any country/language pair (us-en, jp-jp, gb-en, etc.)
• Batch-friendly — integrate into scheduled workflows or multi-step agent pipelines
• LLM-ready output — compact JSON format for direct RAG ingestion

Input Parameters

Field	Type	Default	Description
query	string	(required)	Search query string
maxResults	integer	10	Maximum results to return (max 50)
searchType	string	"web"	"web" for organic results or "news" for recent news
region	string	"us-en"	DuckDuckGo region code (e.g. "gb-en", "jp-jp", "de-de")

Sample Output

{
  "rank": 1,
  "title": "Bitcoin Price Today — Live BTC/USD Chart",
  "url": "https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/",
  "snippet": "Bitcoin (BTC) price today is $96,420 with a 24-hour trading volume of $38.4B...",
  "domain": "coinmarketcap.com"
}

News mode adds published_date to each record when DuckDuckGo provides it:

{
  "rank": 3,
  "title": "Fed signals rate cut pause as inflation cools",
  "url": "https://reuters.com/markets/rates-bonds/...",
  "snippet": "Federal Reserve officials indicated they may pause...",
  "domain": "reuters.com",
  "published_date": "2025-01-15T10:00:00Z"
}

Example Input

{
  "query": "bitcoin ETF approval SEC 2025",
  "maxResults": 20,
  "searchType": "news",
  "region": "us-en"
}

Use Cases

• AI agent web tools — give LLMs real-time search capability without browser automation
• RAG pipelines — enrich vector databases with fresh web content on any topic
• Competitive research — monitor mentions, news, and rankings for a brand or keyword
• News aggregation — collect recent coverage on any topic for summarization
• Market research automation — search for product reviews, pricing, or analyst reports
• Multi-source content pipelines — feed results into downstream summarizer actors

Supported Regions

Common region codes: us-en (USA), gb-en (UK), de-de (Germany), fr-fr (France), jp-jp (Japan), kr-kr (Korea), cn-zh (China), in-en (India), au-en (Australia). DuckDuckGo supports 50+ regional variants.

Pricing

This actor runs extremely fast (typically under 5 seconds) and charges based on Apify compute time. For bulk usage or scheduled runs, compute consumption is minimal — a 24/7 every-5-minutes schedule costs roughly $0.50/month.

FAQ

Is DuckDuckGo's API rate-limited? DuckDuckGo does not publish official rate limits for its instant answer API. In practice, reasonable usage (a few requests per second) works fine. For very high throughput, introduce a short delay between runs.

What is the maximum number of results? Up to 50 results per query. DuckDuckGo's instant answer API typically returns 10–30 unique organic results per query.

Does this support image or video search? Not currently. This actor focuses on web text results and news articles.

Can I use this inside another Apify actor? Yes — call this actor via the Apify client API from any other actor to add web search capability to complex workflows.

How does DuckDuckGo search compare to Google? DuckDuckGo provides privacy-focused search results that differ from Google's personalized results. For unbiased, non-personalized search at scale — ideal for data pipelines — DuckDuckGo is often preferable.

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Related actors

• Google News Scraper — News-specific search for current events alongside general web results
• Hacker News Scraper — Tech community discussions to complement DuckDuckGo web search results
• Wikipedia Article Scraper — Full article content for topics surfaced in web search results

Feedback

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