PowerSearch MCP

PowerSearch MCP helps AI agents search and retrieve content from the public web with fewer broken fetches and clean, AI-friendly outputs ready to cite.

TL;DR

Step 1: Clone the repository then run initialize the virtual environment:

git clone https://github.com/theobjectivedad/powersearch-mcp.git

Step 2: Initialize the virtual environment:

cd powersearch-mcp
make init

Step 3: Activate the virtual environment:

source .venv/bin/activate

Step 4: Create a .env file with your desired configuration, use example-configs/example.env as a starting point.

cp example-configs/example.env .env

Step 5: (Optional) run a local instance of SearXNG:

docker run -d \
    --name searxng-local \
    --pull=always \
    --restart unless-stopped \
    -p 127.0.0.1:9876:8080 \
    --tmpfs /etc/searxng:rw,noexec,nosuid,size=16m \
    --tmpfs /tmp:rw,noexec,nosuid,size=512m \
    --cap-drop=ALL \
    --security-opt=no-new-privileges:true \
    --health-cmd='python3 -c "import urllib.request; urllib.request.urlopen(\"http://127.0.0.1:8080/\", timeout=3).read(1)"' \
    --health-interval=10s \
    --health-timeout=3s \
    --health-retries=10 \
    --health-start-period=15s \
    --env SEARXNG_SETTINGS_PATH=/settings.yml \
    --volume "$(pwd)/searxng.yaml:/settings.yml:ro" \
    searxng/searxng

Step 6: Run PowerSearch via FastMCP:

fastmcp run \
    src/powersearch_mcp/app.py \
    --transport=streamable-http \
    --skip-source \
    --skip-env

Step 7: Point your AI agent at http://localhost:8099/mcp to start searching the web!

Feature Roadmap

• ✅ SearXNG-backed meta search with configurable engines, language, safe-search, and pagination

• ✅ Strong anti-bot fetching implementation via Scrapling and Camoufox

• ✅ Search response caching at the tool-level to memory, disk, and Redis storage backends

• ✅ Automatic retries with exponential backoff for both search and fetch operations

• ✅ AI Agent-friendly responses: HTML pages are converted to markdown automatically via Trafilatura

• ✅ Support for STDIO and streaming HTTP transports

• ✅ Health check endpoint for HTTP transport

• ✅ Extensive configuration suitable for many deployment scenarios

• ✅ Authentication support for both JWT and opaque tokens

• ✅ Authorization support for embedded Eunomia policies

• ✅ Auto summarization of search results via MCP sampling

• ✅ Optional server-side fallback for clients that don't support MCP sampling

• ✅ Public Docker image on Docker Hub

• 🗓️ (Future) Client selectable synchronous (current behavior) or asynchronous SEP-1686 execution for search / fetch tools

• 🗓️ (Future) Prometheus metrics exporter

• 🗓️ (Future) Helm chart