Use this tool when the user asks to find NIH grants — by topic, principal investigator, institution, NIH Institute/Center, activity code, fiscal year, or project number ('what NIH grants exist on CRISPR', 'show me Stanford's R01s in 2022', 'look up 5R01CA036569-02'). This is the primary entry point: results carry pi_profile_id, the key get_pi_profile takes. Read-only bounded search over the entity-resolved NIH ExPORTER/RePORTER corpus; results include mechanism_class, funding_basis and provenance, and a null award_amount means not reported, never zero. Bounds: query/text_search/institution/pi_name 2-64 chars, project_num ^[A-Z0-9-]{1,24}$, activity_code ^[A-Z0-9]{1,5}$, fiscal years 1985-2100, limit 1-50 (default 20), offset 0-100000 (offset>10000 is rate-limited to 12/min — partition by fiscal_year instead). meta.total_funding is the full matching-slice sum, not the returned page. Results are cached for ~1 hour. Counting: one result is one source application-year row, so (project_num, fiscal_year) is NOT unique - a multi-component award (P/U center) emits one row per sub-project, so the same project_num can appear several times in one fiscal year with different PIs and titles. These are distinct NIH application records, not duplicates. Each row carries appl_id, the NIH application id and authoritative row identity - two rows sharing (project_num, fiscal_year) with different appl_id are distinct sub-project applications, and appl_id is the key to de-duplicate on. Use meta.total for rows, meta.unique_project_nums for distinct project numbers, and meta.distinct_awards (row field core_project_num) for distinct awards; never report meta.total as a grant count.