DuckDuckGo News Scraper

Scrapes news search results from DuckDuckGo. Extracts the full canonical news-vertical schema: title, URL, source, author, snippet, thumbnail, published date (ISO + raw + relative), category, breaking/sponsored flags, engagement counts, summary, and more.

What this Actor collects

The Actor converts DuckDuckGo News responses into one clean JSON record per article, including publisher, canonical link, snippet, publication time, author and category when available, result flags, API-page context, and retrieval provenance.

• Uses the input limits and filters below to control the crawl.
• Stores source-backed fields defined by the 52-field dataset schema.
• Omits optional fields when the source does not expose a value instead of writing nulls or fabricated placeholders.

Use cases

• News monitoring
• Publisher and topic research
• Article-feed enrichment

Input

Provide input in JSON. Fields marked required must be supplied. The Default / example column shows a schema default when one exists; otherwise it shows a documented prefill or fixture value.

Field	Type	Required	Default / example	Description
query	string	Yes	"technology"	The news search query.
maxItems	integer	No	50	Maximum number of news articles to scrape.
region	string	No	"us-en"	DDG region code (e.g. us-en, uk-en, de-de).
timeRange	string	No	""	Filter news by date range.
sortBy	string	No	""	Sort results by relevance or date.
proxyConfiguration	object	No	{"useApifyProxy":true}	Proxy settings.
maxRequestRetries	integer	No	2	Retries for navigation and News API page requests.
requestTimeoutSecs	integer	No	45	Maximum seconds to wait for navigation or a News API response.
headless	boolean	No	true	Run Firefox without a visible window.

Example input

{
  "query": "artificial intelligence",
  "maxItems": 50,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  },
  "region": "us-en",
  "maxRequestRetries": 2,
  "requestTimeoutSecs": 45,
  "headless": true
}

Output

The default dataset contains one item per news article result. The following are the most useful fields; author, category, image, and engagement-related metadata depend on the source response.

Field	Type	Description
position	integer	Position
title	string	Title
link	string	Link
source	string	Publisher
publishedAt	string	Published At
snippet	string	Snippet
thumbnail	string	Thumbnail
page	integer	Page
searchQuery	string	Search Query
region	string	Region
scrapedAt	string	Scraped At
type	string	Type
description	string	Description
url	string	URL
query	string	Query
apiPage	integer	API Page

Example dataset item

This compact example is taken from local Actor storage. Long text and nested collections are shortened for documentation only.

{
  "position": 1,
  "title": "Obernolte-Trahan artificial intelligence bill introduced in House",
  "link": "https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/obernolte-trahan-artificial-intelligence-bill-introduced-in-house/ar-AA28xIqW",
  "source": "Politico",
  "publishedAt": "2026-07-23T15:40:19.000Z",
  "snippet": "The newest bill is a revised version of a discussion draft the duo released last month.",
  "page": 1,
  "searchQuery": "artificial intelligence",
  "region": "us-en",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-07-23T17:19:00.504Z",
  "type": "news",
  "description": "The newest bill is a revised version of a discussion draft the duo released last month."
}

Related Actors

• Duck.ai Guest Answers Scraper
• DuckDuckGo Autocomplete Scraper
• DuckDuckGo Bangs Directory Scraper