ScrapeGraphAI/Scrapegraph-ai · error · ImportError

Could not import the 'ddgs' package required for DuckDuckGo

Error message

Could not import the 'ddgs' package required for DuckDuckGo search. Please install it with `pip install -U ddgs`.

What it means

Raised by the DuckDuckGo backend when the optional 'ddgs' package is not installed. The error message tells the user to install it via pip. It is chained from the original ImportError.

Source

Thrown at scrapegraphai/utils/research_web.py:268

    Helper function for DuckDuckGo search using the ``ddgs`` package.

    The ``duckduckgo-search`` package was renamed to ``ddgs``; recent
    ``langchain-community`` releases import ``from ddgs import DDGS``, which
    silently broke the previous langchain-based implementation. This calls
    ``ddgs`` directly so results no longer depend on parsing a formatted string.

    Args:
        query (str): Search query
        max_results (int): Maximum number of results to return
        proxy (str, optional): Proxy configuration

    Returns:
        List[str]: List of URLs from search results
    """
    try:
        from ddgs import DDGS
    except ImportError as e:
        raise ImportError(
            "Could not import the 'ddgs' package required for DuckDuckGo "
            "search. Please install it with `pip install -U ddgs`."
        ) from e

    try:
        with DDGS(proxy=proxy) as ddgs:
            results = [
                result["href"]
                for result in ddgs.text(query, max_results=max_results)
                if result.get("href")
            ]
        return results
    except Exception as e:
        raise SearchRequestError(f"DuckDuckGo search failed: {str(e)}")


def _search_bing(
    query: str, max_results: int, timeout: int, proxy: Optional[str] = None

View on GitHub (pinned to 532dfffbf6)

Solutions

1. pip install -U ddgs (or uv add ddgs)
2. Or install scrapegraphai with the appropriate extras
3. Or switch to an engine whose deps are already available (e.g. google scraping needs no extra package)

Example fix

// before
# engine='duckduckgo' -> ImportError
// after
pip install -U ddgs

try:
    import ddgs  # noqa
    has_ddgs = True
except ImportError:
    has_ddgs = False
if config.search_engine == "duckduckgo" and not has_ddgs:
    config.search_engine = "google"

try:
    results = search_on_web(config)
except ImportError as e:
    print(e); import subprocess; subprocess.run(["pip", "install", "-U", "ddgs"])

When it happens

Trigger: Calling search_on_web with search_engine='duckduckgo' (or having it as default/fallback) without the ddgs package installed in the environment.

Common situations: Installing scrapegraphai without the [search] or duckduckgo extras; using a minimal Docker image; a fresh virtualenv where only core deps were installed.

Related errors

• module {__name__!r} has no attribute {name!r}
• DuckDuckGo search failed: {str(e)}
• The dependencies for screenshot scraping are not installed.

AI-assisted analysis of ScrapeGraphAI/Scrapegraph-ai@532dfffbf6 (2026-08-28). Data as JSON: /api/errors/20463dd63301e898. Report an issue: GitHub.