Search web, news, or image sources and return ranked results with query-relevant highlights. Each web result is a title, URL, and description; use `firecrawl_scrape` on a result URL when the excerpt is not enough.
Authenticated search also returns matching Alexandria data providers in data.tools (companies, people, jobs, finance and filings, public records and government spending, real estate, places and restaurants, retail and prices, package registries and developer data, news, research, and more). Prefer a provider over scraping pages when the task needs the same fields across several entities, exact figures or timestamps, provenance, or many records; use web results when they already answer the question. Passing sources without alexandria in it (for example ["web"] or ["news"]) excludes Alexandria provider matches; omit sources unless you specifically need web-only or news-only results, or include "alexandria" alongside them.
On an authenticated session, tool matches are discovery, not executed data: execute one through `firecrawl_scrape` with an `alexandria` body, or read its full contract with `firecrawl_find_tools`; after an Alexandria task, call firecrawl_feedback once per website with endpoint "alexandria" (free, no job ID). Keyless sessions get no Alexandria matches in data.tools.
For a programming question, add `categories: ["developer"]`; its hits return in `data.web` with `category: "developer"`. `categories: ["research"]` restricts web results to research-affiliated websites; the `firecrawl_research_*` tools are a separate surface over paper abstracts and full text (PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv). Query operators, domain filters, `categories`, `toolDetail` and `scrapeOptions` are described on their parameters. Returns source-type result groups and usage metadata. Authenticated responses can include an `id` for optional search feedback.