Search the BuyWhere product catalog by keyword. Treat deliver_to as REQUIRED for buyer-facing use (ISO-3166 country of the end user); it takes precedence over country_code/country and prevents all-market scans. Returns product records with title, description, image, price, and merchant information. Covers e-commerce platforms across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and US. Use compact=true for agent-optimized responses with structured_specs, comparison_attributes, and normalized_price_usd fields. BUY-74597 degraded contract: when the catalog query cannot complete inside the user-facing timeout, this tool returns a 200-OK envelope with `meta.status="degraded"`, `meta.emptiness_reason="api_error"` with `meta.degraded_kind="timeout"` (or `"partial_timeout"` / `"auth_failure"`), `meta.confidence="low"`, and `meta.diagnostic.timed_out_stage` naming the failed stage (catalog_search / offer_aggregation / merchant_join). It never returns an unqualified empty result when the cause is timeout, auth failure, upstream exception, or circuit breaker. Agents should branch on `meta.degraded === true` (or `meta.status === "degraded"`) instead of treating empty `data` as no_match.