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/ddg_proxy.php

<?php
/* ============================================================
 * SIMON · DuckDuckGo Search Proxy (HTML scraper)
 * ------------------------------------------------------------
 * Upload to:  /htdocs/connlink/test1/ui/ddg_proxy.php
 * Reached at: https://www.gaylordsinclair.com/connlink/test1/ui/ddg_proxy.php?q=QUERY
 *
 * DuckDuckGo's free Instant Answer API only returns zero-click
 * boxes, not organic results. For real web results we hit the
 * lightweight HTML endpoint at html.duckduckgo.com/html/ and
 * parse the result list. No key required.
 *
 * We also blend in the Instant Answer API ("abstract" + "related
 * topics") when it has data, labeled as the top hit.
 *
 * Query params:
 *   q   : query string (required)
 *   num : 1..25 results (default 10)
 * ============================================================ */

header('Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8');
header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *');
header('Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, OPTIONS');

if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] === 'OPTIONS') { http_response_code(204); exit; }

$q = trim((string)($_GET['q'] ?? ''));
if ($q === '') {
  echo json_encode(['ok'=>false, 'err'=>'missing q', 'results'=>[]]);
  exit;
}
$num = max(1, min(25, intval($_GET['num'] ?? 10)));

/* ----- cache ----- */
$CACHE_DIR = __DIR__ . '/cache';
$CACHE_TTL = 600;
if (!is_dir($CACHE_DIR)) { @mkdir($CACHE_DIR, 0755, true); }
$ckey  = sha1('ddg|' . $q . '|' . $num);
$cfile = $CACHE_DIR . '/ddg_' . $ckey . '.json';
if (file_exists($cfile) && (time() - filemtime($cfile)) < $CACHE_TTL) {
  header('X-SIMON-Cache: HIT');
  readfile($cfile);
  exit;
}

/* ----- fetch HTML results ----- */
$upstream = 'https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?' . http_build_query(['q' => $q]);

$ch = curl_init($upstream);
curl_setopt_array($ch, [
  CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
  CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        => 12,
  CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,
  CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS      => 3,
  CURLOPT_ENCODING       => '',
  CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER     => [
    'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 13_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.0 Safari/605.1.15',
    'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
    'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9',
    'Referer: https://duckduckgo.com/',
  ],
]);
$html = curl_exec($ch);
$http = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
$err  = curl_error($ch);
curl_close($ch);

if ($html === false || $http >= 500 || $http === 0) {
  if (file_exists($cfile)) { header('X-SIMON-Cache: STALE'); readfile($cfile); exit; }
  http_response_code(502);
  echo json_encode(['ok'=>false,'err'=>'ddg upstream failed','detail'=>$err,'status'=>$http,'query'=>$q,'results'=>[]]);
  exit;
}

/* ----- parse HTML results ----- *
 * Each result is <div class="result results_links results_links_deep web-result">
 *   <h2 class="result__title"><a class="result__a" href="URL">TITLE</a></h2>
 *   <a class="result__snippet" href="URL">SNIPPET</a>                              */
$items = [];
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$doc = new DOMDocument();
@$doc->loadHTML('<?xml encoding="utf-8" ?>' . $html);
libxml_clear_errors();
$xp = new DOMXPath($doc);

$nodes = $xp->query('//div[contains(concat(" ", normalize-space(@class), " "), " result ") and not(contains(@class,"result--ad"))]');
if ($nodes && $nodes->length) {
  foreach ($nodes as $r) {
    $aNode = $xp->query('.//a[contains(@class,"result__a")]', $r)->item(0);
    if (!$aNode) continue;

$url   = $aNode->getAttribute('href');
    $title = trim(preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $aNode->textContent));

// DuckDuckGo redirects through /l/?uddg=... — unwrap it.
    if (stripos($url, '/l/?') !== false || stripos($url, 'duckduckgo.com/l/') !== false) {
      $parts = [];
      parse_str(parse_url($url, PHP_URL_QUERY) ?? '', $parts);
      if (!empty($parts['uddg'])) { $url = urldecode($parts['uddg']); }
    }
    if ($title === '' || $url === '' || stripos($url, 'http') !== 0) continue;

$snipNode = $xp->query('.//a[contains(@class,"result__snippet")] | .//div[contains(@class,"result__snippet")]', $r)->item(0);
    $snip = $snipNode ? trim(preg_replace('/\s+/', ' ', $snipNode->textContent)) : '';

$src = '';
    $citeNode = $xp->query('.//a[contains(@class,"result__url")] | .//span[contains(@class,"result__url")]', $r)->item(0);
    if ($citeNode) { $src = trim($citeNode->textContent); }
    if ($src === '') { $src = parse_url($url, PHP_URL_HOST) ?? ''; }

$items[] = [
      'title'   => $title,
      'snippet' => $snip,
      'url'     => $url,
      'source'  => $src,
      'image'   => '',
    ];
    if (count($items) >= $num) break;
  }
}

/* ----- optional: blend in Instant Answer abstract as top hit ----- */
$iaUrl = 'https://api.duckduckgo.com/?' . http_build_query([
  'q'              => $q,
  'format'         => 'json',
  'no_html'        => 1,
  'skip_disambig'  => 1,
  't'              => 'simon',
]);
$ch = curl_init($iaUrl);
curl_setopt_array($ch, [
  CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
  CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        => 8,
  CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER     => ['Accept: application/json', 'User-Agent: SIMON/1.0'],
]);
$iaRaw = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$ia = $iaRaw ? json_decode($iaRaw, true) : null;
if (is_array($ia) && !empty($ia['AbstractText']) && !empty($ia['AbstractURL'])) {
  array_unshift($items, [
    'title'   => !empty($ia['Heading']) ? $ia['Heading'] : $q,
    'snippet' => $ia['AbstractText'],
    'url'     => $ia['AbstractURL'],
    'source'  => !empty($ia['AbstractSource']) ? $ia['AbstractSource'] : 'DuckDuckGo',
    'image'   => !empty($ia['Image']) ? (stripos($ia['Image'],'http')===0 ? $ia['Image'] : 'https://duckduckgo.com'.$ia['Image']) : '',
  ]);
  if (count($items) > $num) { $items = array_slice($items, 0, $num); }
}

$out = [
  'ok'      => true,
  'query'   => $q,
  'results' => $items,
  'meta'    => [
    'engine' => 'duckduckgo',
    'count'  => count($items),
    'status' => $http,
  ],
];

$encoded = json_encode($out, JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES|JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE);
@file_put_contents($cfile, $encoded, LOCK_EX);

header('X-SIMON-Cache: MISS');
echo $encoded;

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