ddg-search-mcp

DuckDuckGo Search MCP Server. Scrapes DuckDuckGo Lite directly — no API key required, no rate limits, robust anti-bot protection.

Quick Start

pip install ddg-search-mcp-Albertous007
# or
uvx ddg-search-mcp-Albertous007

From source (before PyPI release)

git clone https://github.com/Albertous007/ddg-search-mcp.git
cd ddg-search-mcp
pip install -e .

Add to your MCP client:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "ddg-search": {
            "command": "uvx",
            "args": ["ddg-search-mcp-Albertous007"]
        }
    }
}

Features

• Advanced Anti-bot Protection: Uses curl_cffi to mimic a real Chrome 131 TLS fingerprint (JA3), seamlessly bypassing most bot detection and CAPTCHA systems.
• Dual Parser Engine: Primary parser for DuckDuckGo Lite HTML, with automatic legacy fallback if the structure changes.
• Parser Health Warning: If the primary parser fails and no results are found, a warning is included in the output with a link to report the issue.
• Full Content Extraction: Deep extraction of page content via trafilatura (with automatic snippet fallback on fetch failure).
• Concurrent Processing: Page content is fetched in parallel to minimize latency.
• Full Region Support: Regional searches (e.g., es-es for Spain, mx-es for Mexico) using the native DuckDuckGo kl parameter.
• Zero Configuration: No API keys, accounts, or complex setup required.
• Structured Logging: All server activity logs to stderr with configurable verbosity.
• Environment Configuration: All constants tunable via environment variables (see .env.example).

No SafeSearch filter

This server does not implement SafeSearch filtering. All search results are returned as-is from DuckDuckGo. If you need content filtering, consider nickclyde/duckduckgo-mcp-server which supports DDG_SAFE_SEARCH=STRICT | MODERATE | OFF.

This is a deliberate design choice — keeping the server simple, fast, and without feature creep.

Installation

From PyPI (recommended)

pip install ddg-search-mcp-Albertous007

From source

git clone https://github.com/Albertous007/ddg-search-mcp.git
cd ddg-search-mcp
pip install -e .

Usage with opencode

After pip install, the installed console script is the simplest option:

{
    "mcp": {
        "ddg-search": {
            "type": "local",
            "command": ["ddg-search-mcp"],
            "enabled": true
        }
    }
}

With python -m

{
    "mcp": {
        "ddg-search": {
            "type": "local",
            "command": ["python", "-m", "ddg_search_mcp"],
            "enabled": true
        }
    }
}

With uvx

{
    "mcp": {
        "ddg-search": {
            "type": "local",
            "command": ["uvx", "ddg-search-mcp-Albertous007"],
            "enabled": true
        }
    }
}

Tool: search

Parameter	Required	Default	Description
query	Yes	—	Search terms
count	No	10	Max results (1–10, configurable via DDG_MAX_RESULTS)
region	No	wt-wt	Region: wt-wt (global), us-en (USA), es-es (Spain), etc.

Environment Variables

All settings are optional — defaults are shown below.

Variable	Default	Description
DDG_LOG_LEVEL	INFO	Log level: DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR
DDG_SEARCH_DELAY	3.0	Min seconds between search requests
DDG_MAX_CONTENT_CHARS	6000	Max chars of page content per result
DDG_MAX_SNIPPET_CHARS	400	Max chars of snippet fallback
DDG_PAGE_FETCH_TIMEOUT	8.0	Timeout (s) for fetching result pages
DDG_SEARCH_TIMEOUT	12.0	Timeout (s) for the search request itself
DDG_MAX_RESULTS	10	Max results returned per search (1–10)

Copy .env.example to .env and customize, or set them directly in your environment.

Cross-platform

Works on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Requires Python 3.10+.

Known Issues

Rate limiting (CAPTCHA)

DuckDuckGo aggressively rate-limits requests from a single IP. This MCP uses DuckDuckGo Lite, browser impersonation, and an integrated 3.0s delay with auto-retries to be as robust as possible.

Symptoms: The tool returns No results found for all queries.

Fix: If blocked, wait a few minutes. The rate limit expires automatically.

HTML structure changes

This MCP scrapes DuckDuckGo's HTML directly. If DDG changes their HTML structure, the parsing logic may need to be updated.

When a search returns no results and the parser structure is suspected to have changed, the output includes a warning:

⚠️  DuckDuckGo may have changed their HTML structure.
    If searches fail consistently, report at:
    https://github.com/Albertous007/ddg-search-mcp/issues

This warning only appears when both the primary and fallback parsers fail to extract results.

Development

git clone https://github.com/Albertous007/ddg-search-mcp.git
cd ddg-search-mcp
pip install -e .
cp .env.example .env   # optional: tweak settings
python -m ddg_search_mcp

Test with MCP Inspector:

pip install mcp[cli]
mcp dev src/ddg_search_mcp/server.py

Run unit tests:

pip install pytest
pytest

Requirements

• Python 3.10+
• curl_cffi (HTTP client with TLS fingerprinting)
• beautifulsoup4 (HTML parsing)
• trafilatura (content extraction)
• mcp (MCP Python SDK)

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

This is a personal project maintained by @Albertous007. If the repository becomes unmaintained, anyone is welcome to fork it.

License

MIT