Use StackExchange API as default search backend#518
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Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all now block HTTP scraping with CAPTCHA/consent pages, making howdoi unable to find answers (fixes #516). Switch to StackExchange API as the default search backend (300 free requests/day, no auth needed). The scraping backends remain available as fallbacks via HOWDOI_SEARCH_ENGINE env var. Also: updated user agents to 2024-era browsers, added consent page detection to block indicators, and made empty results trigger engine fallback instead of silently returning nothing. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Python 3.7 and 3.8 are no longer available on GitHub Actions runners. Update checkout to v4 and setup-python to v5. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Break long USER_AGENTS lines and suppress E231/E713 false positives from f-string colons and string literals. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
pylint 2.15.10 crashes on Python 3.12+ with `visit_typealias` error in astroid. Upgrade to pylint 3.3.6 and flake8 7.1.2. Also fix deprecated pylintrc option and exclude setup.py from pylint (distutils removed in 3.12+). Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.ai/code) via [Happy](https://happy.engineering) Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com> Co-Authored-By: Happy <yesreply@happy.engineering>
- Change default search engine from 'google' to 'stackexchange' in howdoi() and _get_answers() to match _get_links() default - Add force_terminal=True to Rich Console so ANSI color codes are always emitted when -c flag is used (fixes test_colorize) Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.ai/code) via [Happy](https://happy.engineering) Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com> Co-Authored-By: Happy <yesreply@happy.engineering>
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Summary
/2.3/search/advanced) as the default search backend, replacing web scraping which is now blocked by Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGoFixes #516. Also addresses #492 and #489 which have the same root cause (search engines blocking HTTP scraping).
Details
The core issue: all three supported search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo) now actively block the HTTP scraping that howdoi relies on. The StackExchange API provides 300 requests/day without authentication, which is more than sufficient for typical usage.
The
HOWDOI_SEARCH_ENGINEenv var still works — set it togoogle,bing, orduckduckgoto use scraping if preferred. Default is nowstackexchange.Test plan
howdoi print stack trace pythonreturns resultshowdoi format date bashreturns resultshowdoi convert json to csv pythonreturns resultsHOWDOI_SEARCH_ENGINE=googlefallback still works where Google isn't blocking🤖 Generated with Claude Code