firecrawl_search
Search web, news, or image sources and return ranked results with query-relevant highlights. Use it for current information, or to list businesses, people, products, jobs or events with websites, prices or contacts. Each web result is a title, URL, and description; use firecrawl_scrape on a result URL when the excerpt is not enough.
Authenticated search also returns matching Alexandria data providers in data.tools (companies, people, jobs, finance and filings, public records and government spending, real estate, places and restaurants, retail and prices, package registries and developer data, news, research, and more). Prefer a provider over scraping pages when the task needs the same fields across several entities, exact figures or timestamps, provenance, or many records; use web results when they already answer the question. Authenticated searches always add alexandria to the sources, so sources: ["web"] also returns providers; domainTools: false turns off website-matched tools only.
On an authenticated session, tool matches describe available capabilities; firecrawl_find_tools returns their contracts and firecrawl_scrape with an alexandria body executes a selected capability. Keyless sessions get no Alexandria matches in data.tools.
For a programming question, add categories: ["developer"]; its hits return in data.web with category: "developer". For a legal or regulatory question, categories: ["gov"] returns hits in data.web with category: "gov" and cannot be combined with other categories; authenticated sessions also have firecrawl_gov_search as the dedicated tool. Verify gov results' issuer, jurisdiction, status, and version before citing current law. categories: ["research"] restricts web results to research-affiliated websites; the firecrawl_research_* tools are a separate surface over paper abstracts and full text (PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv). Returns source-type result groups and usage metadata. Authenticated responses can include an id for optional search feedback.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| tbs | No | ||
| limit | No | ||
| query | Yes | Query for web and semantic tool discovery. Operators include quoted phrases, `-term`, `site:host`, `inurl:term`, `intitle:term`, and `related:host`; the set is non-exhaustive. Catalogue browsing is available through firecrawl_find_tools. | |
| filter | No | ||
| sources | No | Search sources; authenticated sessions default to web + alexandria, keyless sessions to web only. Authenticated searches always add alexandria to the sources, so sources: ["web"] also returns providers; domainTools: false turns off website-matched tools only. enterprise zdr or anon searches do not add it. Use ["alexandria"] alone for provider discovery without web results. | |
| location | No | ||
| objective | Yes | The user's underlying goal for this call, in one sentence: what they are ultimately trying to accomplish, not a restatement of the URL or query. Reuse it across related calls. Avoid sensitive information. | |
| categories | No | Limit results to specific source types. `research` restricts ordinary web results to research-affiliated websites and returns page snippets, which is separate from the `firecrawl_research_*` tools that search paper abstracts and full text across biomedical (PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv) and arXiv literature; `pdf` searches PDF results; `developer` searches an index built for coding agents over public repositories, GitHub issues, merged pull requests, repository READMEs, and code documentation; `gov` searches the Government Index of US federal, state, and local legal and regulatory sources, the index behind firecrawl_gov_search, and cannot be combined with other categories; gov hits can include historical versions, bill text, agency guidance, and third-party reproductions, so verify the issuer, jurisdiction, enacted/effective status, and version before citing current governing law, clarify a missing jurisdiction or ambiguous as-of date, and use general search for non-US questions or missing coverage (no hits does not establish that no applicable law exists). `developer` and `gov` return hits in `data.web` with `category` set to their name; the other categories also filter `data.web`. | |
| enterprise | No | ||
| highlights | No | Return query-relevant page excerpts for web and news results when available (default). Highlights appear in web `description` and news `snippet`; otherwise, original snippets are returned. Set to false to keep the original search snippets. | |
| toolDetail | No | Compact by default. Compact returns only provider, capability and description; full includes contracts. Inspect selected compact tools with firecrawl_find_tools providers and capabilities. | |
| domainTools | No | Include domain-matched tools for result URLs. Defaults to true when Alexandria is combined with web, news or images; semantic-only search leaves domain matching off. | |
| scrapeOptions | No | Fetches the full page of every web result in the same call, and each fetched result is billed as a scrape. Leave it unset unless the task needs the full text of a few results: highlights usually answer, and firecrawl_scrape can fetch only the URLs you need. These fetches ignore maxAge, so use firecrawl_scrape for a live fetch. scrapeOptions fetches web pages, never Alexandria provider tools. | |
| conversationId | No | conversationId from any earlier Firecrawl tool result in this conversation; after parallel calls, any one of theirs. Omit only on the first call of a conversation; the result returns one to pass on every later call. | |
| excludeDomains | No | Hostnames to leave out of results. Mutually exclusive with includeDomains. | |
| includeDomains | No | Hostnames to restrict results to. Mutually exclusive with excludeDomains. |