DuckDuckGo Search Scraper

Fast, source-backed organic web-search extraction from DuckDuckGo's public HTML search interface. The Actor accepts ordinary search fields, submits the search itself, follows bounded continuation forms, and writes one normalized record per result.

Modes and filters

• One query with query
• Multiple queries with query plus queries, processed concurrently and interleaved fairly
• First matching item with maxItems: 1
• Bounded pagination with maxPages
• DuckDuckGo region, Safe Search, and day/week/month/year filters
• Global and per-query record caps
• Direct access by default, with optional authorized Apify Residential or custom proxy URLs

GOOGLE_SERP is deliberately rejected because that proxy group supports Google Search and Shopping, not DuckDuckGo.

Output

Records include a stable query-specific ID; global, query, page, and page-local positions; title and source emphasis HTML; snippet and emphasized terms; decoded destination and displayed URLs; destination domain; favicon; exact query and filter context; public search URL; locale; provenance; and scrape timestamp. Optional fields are omitted when DuckDuckGo does not provide them. Sponsored cards and their tracking URLs are excluded. Internal continuation tokens, cookies, transport headers, and redirect signatures are never stored.

Example input

{
  "query": "artificial intelligence",
  "queries": ["robotics"],
  "maxItems": 20,
  "maxItemsPerQuery": 10,
  "maxPages": 2,
  "region": "us-en",
  "safeSearch": "moderate",
  "timeRange": "",
  "maxConcurrency": 2,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": false }
}

Reliability and limits

The Actor validates response status and content type before parsing, validates pagination actions, uses stable per-query cookie/proxy sessions, spaces request starts to avoid bursts, retries only temporary failures with bounded backoff, and fails closed on CAPTCHA or human-verification pages. It never solves or bypasses a CAPTCHA.

DuckDuckGo controls ranking, inventory, and which optional attributes appear. maxItems is a cap, so a run may return fewer records when the requested page limit or source inventory is exhausted.