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. Authenticated searches always add alexandria to the sources, so sources: ["web"] also returns providers; domainTools: false turns off website-matched tools only.
On an authenticated session, tool matches describe available capabilities; `firecrawl_find_tools` returns their contracts and `firecrawl_scrape` with an `alexandria` body executes a selected capability. 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"`. For a legal or regulatory question, `categories: ["gov"]` returns hits in `data.web` with `category: "gov"` and cannot be combined with other categories; authenticated sessions also have `firecrawl_gov_search` as the dedicated tool. Verify gov results' issuer, jurisdiction, status, and version before citing current law. `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.
