🔍 web-search-plus-mcp

Source-only multi-provider web search and bounded URL extraction for MCP clients.

web-search-plus-mcp is the standalone MCP packaging of Web Search Plus. It gives Claude Desktop, Cursor, NanoBot, Hermes native MCP, and other MCP-compatible hosts the source-only provider and evidence contract of Web Search Plus 3.0 without depending on the Hermes plugin runtime.

Version note: web-search-plus-mcp uses its own MCP package version (1.0.0) while tracking the source-only Web Search Plus v3.0.2 engine. The Hermes plugin is versioned separately; its plugin-loader, setup, Console, and release commands are not exposed by the standalone MCP server.

✨ Features

• 12 search providers + auto-routing — source-result providers only; answer-only endpoints are rejected instead of being presented as search

• 8 extract providers with private-target protection — Tavily, Exa, Linkup, Parallel, Firecrawl, You.com, Keenable, Serper

• Additive v3 evidence contract — source observations, provider attempts, routing receipts, cache provenance, typed errors, and deterministic legacy projections

• Bounded extraction context — long pages return a bounded preview plus a page-on-demand reference to the stored full text

• Classic Routing v2 authority — registry-backed routing for multilingual/current, docs/API, arXiv, CVE/security, local/shopping, and OSS discovery

• Quality reports + doctor checks — optional routing/result diagnostics plus compact offline health checks for configured providers/cache

• Research mode — opt-in multi-provider search + top-source extraction with a time budget

• Onboarding CLI — status, list, setup, and persistent routing config helpers for MCP env/config wiring

• Zero-install run — uvx web-search-plus-mcp

• MCP-native — stdio server exposing stable web_search and web_extract tools

Related MCP server: OneSearch MCP Server

What changes in 1.0

• Native Perplexity and Kilo Perplexity answer endpoints are removed from the public provider enums because they do not expose a verified source-only mode.

• The two MCP tool names and their legacy result fields remain stable. v3 evidence, attempts, receipts, limits, stored-content references, warnings, and typed errors are additive.

• Existing config entries for retired answer providers are ignored in provider lists; retired default/fallback values are replaced in memory with serper and reported as a migration warning.

• The MCP server keeps its stdio/subprocess boundary. Hermes-specific in-process plugin loading and Operator Console surfaces are intentionally not ported.

See Migrating to 1.0 before upgrading an existing 0.x installation.

🚀 Quick Start

# Run the MCP server instantly with uvx
uvx web-search-plus-mcp

# Or install globally
pip install web-search-plus-mcp
web-search-plus-mcp

At least one provider credential is required for search. Extraction needs at least one extraction-capable provider key.

🧭 Easier onboarding

Check configured providers:

web-search-plus-mcp status

List providers or presets:

web-search-plus-mcp list providers
web-search-plus-mcp list presets

Write a starter .env template and print a canonical MCP stdio snippet:

web-search-plus-mcp setup --preset starter

The recommended starter preset is You.com + Serper + Linkup. It gives a practical source-only baseline for fast current search, Google-style discovery, and extraction workflows without wiring every provider on day one.

status returns a non-zero exit code when no search provider is configured, which makes it usable as a config check in scripts.

Persistent routing preferences live in config.json rather than .env:

web-search-plus-mcp config show
web-search-plus-mcp config set-default you        # strict fixed-provider mode
web-search-plus-mcp config set-routing on         # restore auto-routing
web-search-plus-mcp config set-priority you,serper,exa,firecrawl,tavily,linkup,parallel,brave,keenable
web-search-plus-mcp config set-extract-priority serper,tavily,exa,linkup,parallel,firecrawl,you,keenable
web-search-plus-mcp config set-fallback serper
web-search-plus-mcp config disable parallel
web-search-plus-mcp config enable parallel
web-search-plus-mcp config set-auto-allow parallel on
web-search-plus-mcp config set-threshold 0.45
web-search-plus-mcp config reset --yes

Use --config-path /path/to/config.json or WEB_SEARCH_PLUS_CONFIG=/path/to/config.json for isolated MCP host installs. Provider secrets stay in environment variables; routing behavior stays in config.json. Search and extraction priorities are independent. If an extraction priority lists only selected providers, the remaining extract-capable providers are appended in the public registry order.

Other presets:

• minimal — You.com only

• lean — You.com + Linkup

• starter — You.com + Serper + Linkup

• all — every supported provider env var

⚙️ MCP host config

Canonical stdio snippet for Claude Desktop, Cursor, NanoBot, or Hermes native MCP:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "web-search-plus": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["web-search-plus-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "YOU_API_KEY": "your_you_key",
        "SERPER_API_KEY": "your_serper_key",
        "LINKUP_API_KEY": "your_linkup_key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Common places to paste this snippet:

• Claude Desktop macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

• Claude Desktop Windows: %APPDATA%\\Claude\\claude_desktop_config.json

• Claude Desktop Linux: ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

• Cursor: project/user MCP config using the same mcpServers shape

• Hermes native MCP: ~/.hermes/config.yaml under mcp_servers with equivalent command/env fields

You can also place a .env file next to the package/project with the same variables.

🔎 Search Providers

• You.com — fast source-result provider for current and multilingual search

• Serper — Google-style facts, news, shopping, local queries

• Exa — semantic discovery, GitHub/docs, arXiv/academic, and OSS discovery

• Firecrawl — web search plus scrape-ready content

• Parallel — explicit-only LLM-ready web search with long excerpts (PARALLEL_API_KEY, auto_allow=false)

• Tavily — research and analysis

• Linkup — source-backed grounding/citations

• Brave — explicit-only independent web index by default (BRAVE_API_KEY, auto_allow=false)

• SearXNG — privacy-first self-hosted meta-search

• SerpBase — explicit-only Google SERP API (SERPBASE_API_KEY, auto_allow=false)

• Querit — explicit-only multilingual, real-time AI search (QUERIT_API_KEY, auto_allow=false)

• Keenable — independent web index with search and extraction (KEENABLE_API_KEY, or opt-in keyless public tier; off by default)

📄 Extract Providers

• Tavily — public default first choice; fastest reliable extraction in the v2.1 benchmark

• Exa — fast contents API, strong for docs/academic pages

• Linkup — clean markdown and source-grounded fetches

• Parallel — docs-focused fallback with full-content defaults of 60k characters per result / 120k total

• Firecrawl — robust scrape fallback, useful for JS-heavy/blocked pages

• You.com — LLM-ready snippets/content where available

• Keenable — keyed or explicitly opted-in public extraction

• Serper — fast webpage scraper extraction

auto_routing.extract_provider_priority can override the auto-extraction order without changing search routing. Explicit provider calls still try the requested provider first.

Keenable keyless public access

Keenable exposes authenticated endpoints via KEENABLE_API_KEY. It also has keyless /public endpoints, but those are opt-in and disabled by default. Without a key, Keenable is treated as unconfigured unless you explicitly enable public egress:

{ "keenable": { "allow_public": true } }

or set:

KEENABLE_ALLOW_PUBLIC=1

Use an API key for private or production use. The public endpoint sends queries and fetched URLs to a shared unauthenticated service and remains near the tail of the public default fallback order unless the operator configures a different extraction priority.

Private/internal extraction target guard

web_extract blocks user-supplied target URLs that point at private or internal networks before any provider is called. This covers loopback, RFC1918, CGNAT/shared-address ranges, IPv6 local/mapped-private ranges, multicast, cloud metadata hosts, and hostnames resolving to private/internal IPs.

Operator-configured provider endpoints are separate: local Firecrawl-compatible backends can still run on 127.0.0.1 through provider config. If you intentionally need to extract trusted intranet URLs, opt in explicitly:

{ "extract": { "allow_private_urls": true } }

Leave this off for public/agent-controlled URL extraction.

GroktoCrawl / local Firecrawl-compatible backends

The Firecrawl provider can target a local Firecrawl-v2-compatible backend by overriding its search and scrape URLs in config.json. For example, a local GroktoCrawl instance listening on 127.0.0.1:8080 can be used without adding a separate provider:

{
  "firecrawl": {
    "api_url": "http://127.0.0.1:8080/v2/search",
    "scrape_url": "http://127.0.0.1:8080/v2/scrape"
  }
}

Keep FIRECRAWL_API_KEY configured if your backend enforces bearer authentication; local development instances may ignore the header. This does not make GroktoCrawl the default and does not claim coverage for every Firecrawl endpoint.

🛠 MCP Tool Reference

This MCP server exposes exactly two stable, source-only tools: web_search and web_extract. Use web_search for source discovery and let the MCP host synthesize from those sources when needed; the server itself does not generate answers or truth claims.

The Hermes plugin exposes the same stable capability as web_search_plus and web_extract_plus; the names differ because MCP and Hermes use different tool surfaces.

web_search

Use for source discovery, current events, prices, weather, sports lineups, schedules, and whenever you want the raw search landscape first.

Parameters:

• query — required search query

• provider — auto, serper, serpbase, brave, tavily, querit, linkup, exa, firecrawl, parallel, you, searxng, keenable

• count — results to return, default 5, max 20

• depth — Exa depth: normal, deep, deep-reasoning

• time_range — hour, day, week, month, year

• freshness — unified day, week, month, or year recency request

• search_type — search or Serper-native news

• country / language — explicit locale overrides

• include_domains / exclude_domains — domain allow/deny lists

• mode — normal or research

• quality_report — include routing/result diagnostics

• research_time_budget — best-effort wall-clock budget for research mode

Example MCP arguments:

{
  "query": "latest AI hardware news",
  "provider": "auto",
  "count": 5,
  "quality_report": true
}

web_extract

Parameters:

• urls — required list of URLs

• provider — auto, tavily, exa, linkup, parallel, firecrawl, you, keenable, serper

• format — markdown or html

• include_images — include image metadata when supported

• include_raw_html — include raw HTML when supported

• render_js — render JavaScript before extraction when supported

Example MCP arguments:

{
  "urls": ["https://example.com"],
  "provider": "auto",
  "format": "markdown"
}

🧠 Classic Routing v2 examples

• 東京 AI ニュース 今日 → You.com multilingual/current search

• arXiv 2024 LLM scaling laws → Exa academic discovery

• CVE-2025 openssl advisory → Serper security/current search

• best bookshelf speakers under 1000 EUR Austria → Serper/Firecrawl shopping/local search

• open source alternatives to Linear → Exa/Firecrawl OSS discovery

• recent RAG vs fine-tuning benchmark sources → source-result discovery; the MCP host may synthesize from returned sources

Guarded providers can still be called explicitly. To let one participate in provider="auto", opt in:

web-search-plus-mcp config set-auto-allow parallel on
web-search-plus-mcp config set-auto-allow parallel off

Development

python -m pip install -e ".[test]"
python -m pytest tests/ -q -p no:cacheprovider
ruff check .
python -m build

The GitHub Actions workflow runs the test suite on Python 3.10, 3.11, and 3.12, then verifies Ruff, byte-compilation, wheel creation, and source-distribution creation.

Credits

Built on the Web Search Plus routing engine and packaged as a standalone MCP server.

License

MIT © 2026 robbyczgw-cla