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DDGS

open source / Overall score: 4.0(strong)

Metasearch library that runs one query against ten public web search services - Bing, Brave, DuckDuckGo, Google, Grokipedia, Mojeek, Startpage, Yandex, Yahoo and Wikipedia - and returns their results in one list. Ships a CLI, an optional FastAPI server and an optional MCP server, all run by the caller with no account and no key.

Formerly `duckduckgo_search`; DuckDuckGo is now one backend of ten, so the DuckDuckGo framing the name still carries is wrong and the display name follows the repository. `deedy5` is an individual GitHub account rather than an organization. Two things worth knowing before this is read as an ordinary MIT library: what it does to Bing, Google, Brave and Startpage is scraping those engines have not sanctioned, and the README's entire disclaimer is the single line "This library is for educational purposes only" - which sits in the README and not in the LICENSE, so it does not narrow the MIT grant.

Openness

5 high confidence

5.0

license: MIT(OSI
source: public(the whole library, CLI and both optional servers)
self-host: yes(there is nothing else - no hosted service exists)
service: none
core features withheld: no — no vendor tier for anything to be withheld for

Open source with nothing behind it: the MIT grant covers the product itself rather than a client in front of a closed index, which is what separates this record from every other search product in the category. The READMEs "educational purposes only" line is a disclaimer about use and not a licence term - it is not in LICENSE.md, which is the unmodified MIT text.

https://api.github.com/repos/deedy5/ddgs recorded 2026-09-16
Repository metadata for deedy5/ddgs: spdx_id MIT, 2,973 stars, not archived, not a fork, last pushed 2026-08-26, description "A metasearch library that aggregates results from diverse web search services".
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/deedy5/ddgs/main/LICENSE.md recorded 2026-09-17
The LICENSE.md body: verbatim MIT text, "Copyright (c) 2022 deedy5", with no added clause, field-of-use restriction or non-commercial rider.

Adoption

4 high confidence

4.0

Adoption is measured by PyPI downloads of the ddgs package. The library is the product itself, with no separate service or client to call, so package downloads measure use of the product itself, not a proxy for it.

https://pypistats.org/api/packages/ddgs/recent recorded 2026-09-16
last_month = 5,600,698 downloads for the package `ddgs` (last_week 1,179,206, last_day 185,847).

Capability

4 high confidence

4.0

DDGS answers a query with ranked references through text(), and extract() fetches the full content of any URL. That find-then-fetch combination puts it level with Firecrawl.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/deedy5/ddgs/main/README.md recorded 2026-09-17
The README: "A metasearch library that aggregates results from diverse web search services", the backend table listing ten `text()` backends, the worked `text()` example returning objects of exactly {title, href, body}, and "extract(): Fetch a URL and extract its content in various formats" documented as taking `url`.

Verified 2026-09-16