Duck Duck Scrape MCP

The Duck Duck Scrape MCP server offers a lightweight, cost‑free bridge between AI assistants and the web search engine DuckDuckGo. By scraping DuckDuckGo’s results instead of relying on paid APIs, this server lets developers embed real‑time search capabilities into Claude or other MCP‑compatible assistants without incurring external costs. The server’s design mirrors the familiar Brave search MCP, ensuring that teams already accustomed to that ecosystem can adopt it with minimal friction.

At its core, the server receives a search query from an MCP client, forwards it to DuckDuckGo’s web interface, parses the returned HTML, and returns a structured JSON payload containing titles, URLs, snippets, and other metadata. Because the output is machine‑readable, downstream AI models can easily ingest and reason about search results, enabling sophisticated answer generation or knowledge‑base updates. The scraper respects DuckDuckGo’s terms of service, and developers are encouraged to review those guidelines before deploying the server in production.

Key features include:

• Zero‑cost search: No API keys or billing required, making it ideal for prototypes and low‑budget projects.
• Simplicity: The server is launched via a single command, and its MCP configuration follows the standard stdio pattern.
• Compatibility: Works with any MCP client that supports stdio, such as Claude’s internal tool execution framework.
• Privacy‑first: DuckDuckGo is known for its privacy‑centric approach, so queries do not leave personal data exposed to third parties.
• Extensibility: The parsed JSON can be augmented with additional fields (e.g., confidence scores) if needed by the consuming AI workflow.

Typical use cases span from building knowledge‑base assistants that pull up-to-date information, to creating interactive chatbots that can browse the web for recent news or product details. In research settings, the server allows rapid iteration on retrieval‑augmented generation models without waiting for API quotas. For educational projects, students can experiment with web scraping and AI integration in a single, self‑contained package.

Integrating Duck Duck Scrape MCP into an existing AI workflow is straightforward: a client sends a search request, receives structured results, and feeds them into the assistant’s prompt or as arguments to a downstream tool. Because the output is already JSON, developers can pipe it directly into embeddings or index structures for retrieval‑augmented generation. The server’s lightweight nature also means it can run on edge devices or within CI pipelines, offering flexibility across deployment environments.