# Changelog of DuckDuckGo Maps Scraper (`searchapi/duckduckgo-maps-scraper`) Actor

- **URL**: https://apify.com/searchapi/duckduckgo-maps-scraper/changelog.md
- **Full Actor documentation**: https://apify.com/searchapi/duckduckgo-maps-scraper.md

## Changelog

### 2026-10-02 — bounded direct preview readiness

- Match Playwright `1.62.1` to the Firefox `22-1.62.1` image and retain standard sandbox and TLS behavior after a Chromium namespace launch failure was observed in the cloud runtime.
- Use locked dependency installation and verify the matching Firefox executable during the build. Report Firefox provenance for new actor output.
- Set the public prefill and checked-in input to the exact newly observed `artificial intelligence` Maps URL, an empty location, two rows, zero retries, and an explicit direct connection. The older proxy-enabled form prefill is replaced with this fresh direct baseline; runtime input defaults and explicit proxy support remain unchanged.
- Exclude local state, credentials, dependencies, and QA artifacts from upload/build context.
- Decode the newly observed single-place detail article and its Address/Phone/Hours definition list, retaining the older ranked-card decoder.
- Fail before browser launch if an explicitly requested proxy cannot be configured.
- Add offline coverage for preview URL and bounds, Firefox launch defaults, dependency/image matching, denial versus server retries, dataset acknowledgement, and upload exclusions. These tests do not establish live actor availability.

### Local recovery - 2026-10-02

- Reject unknown empty/non-HTML pages and preserve explicit local empty-state handling.
- Exclude unrated and invalid-rating cards when `minRating` is requested.
- Detect challenge variants and verification redirects before retries or extraction.
- Release the browser when context/page setup fails; count only acknowledged cleaned rows.
- Eight offline regressions pass. The prior automated CAPTCHA hold remains; no live source or cloud run was performed.

### \[2.1.0] - 2026-09-22

#### Changed

- Switched the actor from Firefox to the Apify Playwright Chrome image.
- Added extraction for the current `maps-vertical-sidebar` card structure used by DuckDuckGo Maps.
- Added stable generated identifiers, source and page positions, rating provider data, displayed open status, review snippets, price levels, source URLs, retrieval metadata, and a full details dataset view.
- Removed the stale DuckDuckGo web search documentation and aligned the input and output descriptions with Maps.
- Added dataset auditing and expanded local validation scripts.

#### Verified

- The live Chrome page for `coffee shops near New York` rendered public Maps cards with names, Yelp review counts, categories, ratings, prices, addresses, phone numbers, hours, snippets, and thumbnails.

### \[2.0.0] - 2026-06-12

#### Added

- Initial rich DuckDuckGo Maps schema and normalizer.
- Local input and dataset validation scripts.