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Say that DDGS needs nothing installed, and what to check when search returns nothing

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The DDGS page opened with the banner used for community tutorials, on a provider that ships inside Open WebUI and appears in the admin engine list. A reader following it reasonably concluded that DDGS was a separate service to deploy and connect, and went looking for a container, a URL and an API key that do not exist. The page now says there is nothing to install and no account to create, and points anyone who wants a provider's official API at the entries that do take a key.

Two failure modes are documented alongside it. Pinning a single backend makes every search depend on that one provider continuing to serve automated requests, and a provider that stops doing so can answer with a page carrying no results rather than an error, so the advice is to return to Auto before changing anything else. Separately, a model reporting that the search tool is unavailable is usually a gating problem rather than a search problem, and the per-model web search capability is the setting people do not think to check.
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docs/features/chat-conversations/web-search/providers/ddgs.mdx
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@@ -3,12 +3,6 @@ sidebar_position: 4
title: "DDGS"
---
:::warning
This tutorial is a community contribution and is not supported by the Open WebUI team. It serves only as a demonstration on how to customize Open WebUI for your specific use case. Want to contribute? Check out the contributing tutorial.
:::
:::tip
For a comprehensive list of all environment variables related to Web Search (including concurrency settings, result counts, and more), please refer to the [Environment Configuration documentation](/reference/env-configuration#web-search).
@@ -23,7 +17,13 @@ Having issues with web search? Check out the [Web Search Troubleshooting Guide](
## DDGS (Dux Distributed Global Search)
DDGS is a metasearch engine that allows you to search multiple providers through a single interface.
DDGS is a metasearch engine that allows you to search multiple providers through a single interface.
:::info Nothing to install and no account needed
DDGS ships with Open WebUI and runs inside it. There is no separate service to deploy, no container to connect, no URL to point at and no API key to obtain. The three steps below are the entire setup.
It reaches each search provider through that provider's public pages rather than through a paid API. If you want a provider's official API, with the reliability and the quota that come with it, use its own entry in the Web Search Engine list instead, such as Brave, Google PSE or SerpApi, each of which does take a key.
:::
### Setup
@@ -49,3 +49,15 @@ You can also configure the backend using the `DDGS_BACKEND` environment variable
```bash
DDGS_BACKEND="google"
```
#### Choosing a backend
**Auto (Random)** is the default and the most reliable choice. Because each search picks a provider at random, one provider refusing the request does not take searching down with it.
Pinning a single backend makes every search depend on that one provider continuing to serve automated requests. Providers vary in how they treat them, and some answer with a page that carries no results rather than with an error, so a pinned backend can return nothing while the rest keep working. The same provider can also start refusing after a period of normal use, and a shared or datacenter address is more likely to be refused than a home connection.
If searches return nothing on a pinned backend, switch back to Auto before changing anything else.
:::warning The model says the search tool is unavailable
This usually has nothing to do with the search engine. The tool is offered to a model only when web search is enabled in the admin settings, enabled for that specific model in its editor, enabled for the chat, permitted for the user, and the model is not set to Legacy function calling. A model with the web search capability switched off in its own editor will say the tool is unavailable while searching works perfectly everywhere else.
:::