Search the web for current information on any topic. Returns extracted page content, not just snippets. Best for factual lookups, specific questions, or when you need a list of sources. For open-ended questions that need synthesis across many sources, use the research tool instead.
For news queries (current events, breaking news, politics, world events), set topic="news" to search news sources specifically. This returns recent articles with publication dates.
Set include_answer=true to get an AI-synthesized answer alongside results (adds 10 credits). This is the sweet spot for most agent tasks, e.g. basic + include_answer = 12 credits, much cheaper than a full 50-credit research call.
Returns: query, answer (if requested), results (array of {title, url, content, description, fetched, published_date}), search_depth, topic, elapsed_ms, credits_used, credits_remaining, altered_query, relaxed_query (set when the query matched nothing and was retried once with its site: operator, else its quotes, removed - the results answer that looser query).
Args:
query: The search query
search_depth: "basic" (default) for extracted page content (2 credits), "snippets" for SERP snippets only without page fetching (1 credit)
max_results: Number of results (default 10, max 20)
include_answer: Generate an AI answer that synthesizes the search results (adds 10 credits)
include_domains: Only include results from these domains (max 10)
exclude_domains: Exclude results from these domains (max 10)
topic: "general" for web search, "news" for news articles. use "news" for current events, breaking news, politics, or any time-sensitive query
freshness: Filter by recency - "day", "week", "month", "year", or "YYYY-MM-DD:YYYY-MM-DD"