Web Search

Web Search

Search the web and read page content using DuckDuckGo and Mozilla Readability extraction.

Prerequisites

No external system tools are required. Search and page fetching use the Node.js runtime built into pi.

Tools

web_search

Search the web using DuckDuckGo. Returns titles, URLs, and content snippets.

When to use:

• The user asks to find information online
• Looking up documentation not available locally
• Verifying facts or looking up recent data

Parameters:

• query (string, required): Search query
• maxResults (number, optional, default 5, max 10): How many results to return
• maxResponseChars (number, optional): Truncate output to this many characters

Guidelines:

• Always follow up with web_read if the user needs full page content
• DuckDuckGo is used — no API key required
• Rate limits apply; avoid rapid repeated queries

web_read

Fetch a web page and extract readable content.

When to use:

• You need the full content of a specific page
• Following up on a web_search result
• Reading documentation or articles

Parameters:

• url (string, required): Page URL (must be http: or https:)
• maxChars (number, optional, default 8000, max 50000): How many characters of content to return
• maxResponseChars (number, optional): Truncate output to this many characters

Guidelines:

• Works best on article/blog pages
• JavaScript-heavy SPAs may return limited content (no JS execution)
• Private/internal URLs (localhost, 127.0.0.1, 169.254.x.x, etc.) are blocked for security

Limitations

• No JavaScript rendering: Pages that require JS to load content will return incomplete results.
• HTML only: PDFs or other binary formats are not supported.
• DuckDuckGo rate limiting: Aggressive querying may be throttled.

Source: emanuelcasco/pi-mono-extensions — distributed by TomeVault.