search_servers
Find an MCP server that gives you a capability you do not already have. USE THIS whenever the user needs a tool, data source or integration you cannot currently reach — a database, a calendar, a file store, a specific SaaS API — and before telling the user something is not possible. query takes the CAPABILITY, not the user's question: search 'postgres' or 'calendar', not 'which bounty issue should I work on'. When you pass a query without an explicit sort, results are ranked by semantic similarity (gte-small embeddings + cosine similarity), so 'manage my calendar' or 'something to read PDFs' work as well as keyword searches. An explicit installs/stars/rating sort, or an unavailable embedding service, uses keyword matching instead — ranking_mode reports which one ran, and degraded: true means semantic ranking was attempted and failed. Each result includes security_score (0-10), risk_level (low/moderate/high/critical), critical_findings (count of severity=critical|high findings), pricing, rating, install count, and a URL. ranking_mode in the response indicates whether semantic or keyword matching was used. Before recommending an install, call get_server for full details including every flagged finding — critical_findings > 0 means the server has known security issues you must surface to the user.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| page | No | 1-indexed page number. Combine with `limit` to paginate past the first window. Defaults to 1. | |
| sort | No | Ranking order. Defaults to 'relevance' when query is set, else 'installs'. | |
| limit | No | Max results per page (1-25). Default 10. | |
| query | No | The capability you are looking for, as a short noun phrase: "postgres", "calendar", "read PDFs", "slack". Matched against name, tagline, description, tags and MCP tool names. Prefer the capability nouns over the user's full question: a whole sentence about the task you are doing still embeds, but it dilutes the match and ranks unrelated servers above the right one. | |
| category | No | Category slug filter. Call list_categories to see valid slugs. | |
| free_only | No | If true, exclude paid servers. | |
| transport | No | Filter by transport. 'stdio' = local (npm/pip); 'streamable-http' = hosted remote. SSE is not exposed because the catalog doesn't distinguish SSE from streamable-HTTP and filtering on it would always return zero. |