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If you don't like all the fluff on the results page, DDG provides two alternative interfaces [0] [1] with much simpler layouts.

[0] https://html.duckduckgo.com/html

[1] https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite

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This is my first seeing https://html.duckduckgo.com/html and surprisingly I am enjoying it

I would prefer if there was a way to have dark mode or similar things in it tho. It was really really fast.

cool, but they block curl requests with an iframe and such

I would pay DDG if they gave me an API for search, ideally pay-per-request. I'm not paying them for Ai, I can get that much better elsewhere

IIRC the reason they don't (can't?) provide a search API directly is because they're pulling from other search sources, e.g. Bing, and can't provide an API without licence violations.

Agreed that a DDG API would be pretty great, though.

IF they wish for an API, I think brave search supports API because they are an independent search index.

There are lots of options outside of the companies that make browsers and search input boxes on websites

SERP, EXA, Tavily... they are becoming a dime-a-dozen with the Ai hype b/c (1) making the process of fetch/scraping easier (2) being the primary end user of search API (3) making the creating of such an API easier

I haven't dug in enough to any of them to get a sense of result quality or consistency

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