DuckDuckGo

This OVOS skill answers factual questions with DuckDuckGo Instant Answers. It uses ovos-ddg-plugin to query the API and extract facts from the results.

Install

pip install ovos-skill-ddg

Examples

• "search DuckDuckGo for Stephen Hawking"
• "who is Marie Curie"
• "what is the Eiffel Tower"
• "when was Albert Einstein born"
• "Isaac Newton"

How it works

The skill takes part in three OVOS pipeline stages.

Pipeline	Trigger	Priority
Padacioso intent (search_duck.intent)	Explicit "search DuckDuckGo for …" phrases	High
Common Query	Open factual questions routed by the common-query pipeline	none
Fallback	Any utterance not claimed by another skill	90 (last resort)

The skill sends queries to the DuckDuckGo Instant Answers API through ovos-ddg-plugin. The plugin handles:

• Infobox field extraction: structured facts (birthdate, nationality, occupation, …) matched with locale-aware Padacioso intents
• Abstract text: encyclopedic summary sentences
• Keyword extraction fallback: when a conversational phrase returns no result, the skill extracts keywords and re-queries (this needs ovos-rake-keyword-extractor or a compatible plugin)

The skill detects blacklisted domains (weather, reminders, alarms, timers, music, calls) with per-locale vocabulary files and routes them to the matching skill instead.

Supported languages

37 locales cover all languages in the DuckDuckGo API locale mapping.

ar bg ca cs da de el en es et fi fil fr he hr hu id it ja ko lt lv ms nb nl pl pt ro ru sk sl sv th tr uk vi zh

Related projects

• ovos-ddg-plugin: the query and answer-extraction backend this skill uses

Category

Information

Tags

#duckduckgo #query #search-engine #searchengine

License

Apache-2.0