diff --git a/backend/src/agents/expert.py b/backend/src/agents/expert.py
index 72d7e30..f886b91 100644
--- a/backend/src/agents/expert.py
+++ b/backend/src/agents/expert.py
@@ -31,17 +31,17 @@ async def chat_completion_loop(app, run, messages, model_id=None, tools=None):
             opts=run.input,
         )
 
+        pre_len = len(messages)
         async for msg in generator:
             messages.append(msg)
+            run.emit_event('inference', msg)
             if msg.role == 'tool':
                 tool_calls.append(msg.content)
             if msg.role == 'assistant':
                 turn_response = True
 
-            run.emit_event('inference', msg)
-
-        # Broken generator with no output
-        else: break
+        # Avoid infinite loops from server failures
+        if len(messages) == pre_len: break
 
         for tc in tool_calls:
             tool = next((t for t in tools if t.name == tc.tool_name), None)
@@ -53,9 +53,8 @@ async def chat_completion_loop(app, run, messages, model_id=None, tools=None):
             else:
                 tc.tool = tool
 
-        # If not calling must output something useful
-        else:
-            if turn_response: break
+        # If not calling, respond to end the turn
+        if not (tool_calls and execute_tools) and turn_response: break
 
     run.close()
 
diff --git a/backend/src/features/web.py b/backend/src/features/web.py
index 0e85ed8..fb8f0a9 100644
--- a/backend/src/features/web.py
+++ b/backend/src/features/web.py
@@ -6,6 +6,7 @@ class's automatic ``ToolSpec`` generation (docstring -> description,
 """
 
 import re
+import urllib.parse
 import urllib.request
 from html import unescape
 
@@ -28,24 +29,68 @@ def _strip_html(html: str) -> str:
 class WebSearch(Tool):
     """Search the web with DuckDuckGo. Returns titles, URLs and snippets."""
 
+    ENDPOINT = "https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/"
+    USER_AGENT = (
+        "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 "
+        "(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0 Safari/537.36"
+    )
+
+    # Result anchors look like:
+    #   <a class="result__a" href="//duckduckgo.com/l/?uddg=...">Title</a>
+    _RESULT_RE = re.compile(
+        r'<a[^>]*class="[^"]*\bresult__a\b[^"]*"[^>]*href="(?P<href>[^"]+)"[^>]*>'
+        r"(?P<title>.*?)</a>",
+        re.DOTALL,
+    )
+    _SNIPPET_RE = re.compile(
+        r'<a[^>]*class="[^"]*\bresult__snippet\b[^"]*"[^>]*>(?P<snippet>.*?)</a>',
+        re.DOTALL,
+    )
+
     def run(self, query: str, max_results: int = 5):
-        # `ddgs` is the current package name; `duckduckgo_search` is the legacy one.
-        try:
-            from ddgs import DDGS
-        except ImportError:  # pragma: no cover - fallback for older installs
-            from duckduckgo_search import DDGS
+        body = urllib.parse.urlencode({"q": query}).encode("utf-8")
+        req = urllib.request.Request(
+            self.ENDPOINT,
+            data=body,
+            method="POST",
+            headers={
+                "User-Agent": self.USER_AGENT,
+                "Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
+                "Accept": "text/html",
+            },
+        )
+        with urllib.request.urlopen(req, timeout=15) as resp:
+            page = resp.read().decode("utf-8", errors="replace")
 
-        with DDGS() as ddgs:
-            results = list(ddgs.text(query, max_results=max_results))
+        snippets = [m.group("snippet") for m in self._SNIPPET_RE.finditer(page)]
 
-        return [
-            {
-                "title": r.get("title", ""),
-                "url": r.get("href", ""),
-                "snippet": r.get("body", ""),
-            }
-            for r in results
-        ]
+        results = []
+        for i, match in enumerate(self._RESULT_RE.finditer(page)):
+            if len(results) >= max_results:
+                break
+            results.append({
+                "title": self._clean(match.group("title")),
+                "url": self._unwrap(match.group("href")),
+                "snippet": self._clean(snippets[i]) if i < len(snippets) else "",
+            })
+        return results
+
+    @staticmethod
+    def _clean(value: str) -> str:
+        return unescape(re.sub(r"<[^>]+>", "", value)).strip()
+
+    @staticmethod
+    def _unwrap(href: str) -> str:
+        # DDG wraps result links as //duckduckgo.com/l/?uddg=<url-encoded-target>
+        if "uddg=" in href:
+            target = urllib.parse.parse_qs(urllib.parse.urlparse(href).query).get(
+                "uddg", [""]
+            )[0]
+            if target:
+                return target
+        if href.startswith("//"):
+            return "https:" + href
+        return href
 
 
 class WebFetch(Tool):
diff --git a/backend/src/tool.py b/backend/src/tool.py
index a501322..493ae32 100644
--- a/backend/src/tool.py
+++ b/backend/src/tool.py
@@ -149,7 +149,7 @@ class Tool:
     
     @classmethod
     def tool_name(cls):
-        return ''.join(['-'+c.lower() if c.isupper() else c for c in cls.__name__]).lstrip('_')
+        return ''.join(['-'+c.lower() if c.isupper() else c for c in cls.__name__]).lstrip('-')
 
 
     def _generate_spec(self):