DuckDuckGo Reworked for LM Studio

Reliable DuckDuckGo web and image search tools for LM Studio with stronger anti-block resilience, better output consistency for LLM tool chaining, and cleaner diagnostics.

What was broken before

The previous implementation had several practical issues in real usage:

• Web search sometimes returned only https://duckduckgo.com/ instead of actual results.
• DDG redirect links were not decoded correctly, so target URLs were lost.
• Internal DuckDuckGo links polluted the final output and looked like "valid" search hits.
• Label extraction was noisy because HTML text was not normalized robustly.
• Image search frequently failed with Forbidden or Unable to extract vqd token with no useful fallback path.
• Image filtering was too strict (URL extension based), dropping valid CDN images without .jpg/.png suffixes.
• Download stage could report confusing outcomes (including false-positive success patterns in older behavior).
• Tool-output shape encouraged weak orchestration in some models (extra unnecessary calls to downstream image tools).

What is fixed in this reworked version

Web Search quality improvements

• Uses https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ for more stable HTML result pages.
• Replaces fragile URL regex extraction with anchor-level parsing (<a href=...>).
• Decodes DuckDuckGo redirect links via uddg into real destination URLs.
• Filters out internal DuckDuckGo service/home links from results.
• Cleans HTML labels and normalizes whitespace for readable output.

Image Search reliability improvements

• Added resilient retry/backoff for DDG requests (vqd bootstrap and endpoint).

Multi-source fallback (no API keys)

When DDG image endpoint is blocked or unstable, Image Search now automatically runs a fallback chain:

• DuckDuckGo web results (html.duckduckgo.com)
• Extract image candidates from top pages (src, data-src, data-original, srcset, markdown image links)
• Download and validate candidates (content-type: image/*)
• Return renderable local markdown images

Fallback responses include source: "web_fallback" when that path was used.

Output consistency for LLM tool use

• Image Search returns renderable markdown images in a consistent shape:
  • images
  • count
  • hint (that images are already downloaded/renderable)
• This reduces redundant tool hops and improves assistant decision quality in multi-tool flows.

Better result reliability (general)

• Preserves deduplication, pagination (page, pageSize), and safeSearch behavior.

Installation

Install from LM Studio Hub:

• vadimfedenko/duck-duck-go-reworked

Then click Run in LM Studio.

Configuration

• Search Results Per Page: max number of search results (0 = auto).
• Safe Search: off, moderate, strict (auto lets assistant decide).

Usage

With the plugin enabled, the assistant can:

• run web search (Web Search)
• run image search (Image Search)
• paginate results when needed

Works especially well with the Analyze Images and improved Visit Website plugin:

• vadimfedenko/analyze-images
• vadimfedenko/visit-website-reworked

LLM can find images via this plugin, then analyze the content with analyze.

Changelog (reworked release)

• Fixed homepage-only result regression.
• Added DDG redirect target decoding.
• Added internal-link filtering.
• Improved title/label extraction cleanliness.
• Added robust image fetch retries and anti-block diagnostics.
• Added automatic web-fallback image pipeline when DDG image endpoint is blocked.
• Added output consistency hints for better model tool orchestration.

Examples

• Example 1
• Example 2