privatesearch

privatesearch

privatesearch looks things up on the web without an account, an API key, or a search subscription. It asks DuckDuckGo's public HTML endpoint a question and hands back the titles, addresses, and excerpts of what came up, and it can also open a page and return the words on it as plain readable text. It works from the command line or as an MCP server for agents.

Install

npx @reneturcios/privatesearch search "trail running shoes"

Or run the container image:

docker run -i ghcr.io/cloudcorprecords/privatesearch

The container defaults to the MCP server (see below). Pass CLI arguments to use it as a CLI instead.

CLI

# Search the web; results print as title / URL / snippet blocks
privatesearch search "composting basics"
privatesearch search "composting basics" --max-results 5 --region uk-en
privatesearch search "composting basics" --json

# Fetch a page as readable text (markup, scripts, and styles removed)
privatesearch fetch-content https://example.com/some/article

privatesearch --version

Exit codes: 0 on success, 1 when a search or fetch fails (the error names the problem), 2 for usage errors.

MCP server

One bin serves both faces. The mcp subcommand starts a stdio MCP server:

npx -y @reneturcios/privatesearch mcp

MCP client configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "privatesearch": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@reneturcios/privatesearch", "mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Tools

Tool	Input	What it returns
search	query (string, required), max_results (integer, optional), region (string, optional, a DuckDuckGo region code such as us-en)	The matching results: for each one a title, the destination URL (redirect wrappers are unwrapped), and a snippet excerpt.
fetch_content	url (string, required)	The page's readable text: script, style, and head material removed, tags stripped, entities decoded.

Search reads the result blocks of the HTML endpoint's response page; when the endpoint returns no blocks the result list is empty rather than an error. Fetch failures (non-2xx responses, unreachable hosts) are reported as tool errors.

Development

npm install
npm run build   # tsc -> dist/
npm test        # node test runner over test/*.test.ts, no network (fake fetch fixtures)
npm run dev     # run the CLI from source via tsx

License

MIT — see LICENSE.