websearch MCP Server

mcp-name: io.github.SK-DEV-AI/websearch

· npx skills add SK-DEV-AI/skills

Multi-engine web search + fetch MCP server. Parallel fan-out across DuckDuckGo, Bing Web/News RSS, Tavily, Wikipedia, arXiv, Google News RSS, Brave (last resort — rate-limited from some networks), Google AI Mode, and intent-gated vertical lanes (MDN, Stack Exchange, GitHub, HN, Semantic Scholar, OSV vuln, grep.app/Sourcegraph code, GDELT news) — with consensus-merge dedup, a local cross-encoder reranker, and Groq synthesis with grounding checks.

Tools (10)

• search — Open research questions. depth=1 snippets, depth≥2 full-page fetch + rerank. synthesize returns a Groq answer with [N] citations.
• fetch — URL to markdown/text. Direct fetch with auto-fallback to the Helium CDP browser for blocked/JS pages. PDF/EPUB/DOCX supported. Paginated (offset). For structured JSON use extract.
• screenshot — ARIA accessibility snapshot (LLM-readable page text and interactive structure).
• browser_action — Drive a real browser page (navigate, click, type, press a key, evaluate JS, read HTML/text, ARIA tree, screenshot). Use when a page needs interaction; for plain reading use fetch.
• wikipedia — Full Wikipedia API client: articles, summaries, categories, links, pageviews, revisions, backlinks, geosearch, recent changes, random pages.
• arxiv — arXiv paper search with boolean/phrase/wildcard query syntax (single-source; multi-source paper search lives in codesearch papers).
• extract — Structured JSON from a page via CSS (fast, free), LLM, or regex strategies. Repeat calls cached.
• pdf_extract — PDF to markdown/json/html. PyMuPDF fast path for text-layer PDFs, Docling+OCR fallback for scanned PDFs.
• map_site — Survey a site's pages via sitemap XML (primary) + HTML link fallback, before fetching individually.
• ping — Connectivity check for the internet and key search endpoints. Use before expensive calls when uncertain.

Setup

Requires Python 3.14+.

python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
cp run.example run   # fill in your API keys (run is gitignored — never commit it)
chmod +x run

Point your MCP client at run (stdio):

{ "websearch": { "command": "/path/to/websearch/run" } }

API keys (run)

Everything else (DDG, Bing RSS, Wikipedia, arXiv, RSS) is keyless. Brave's HTML scrape is currently rate-limited from some networks, so Bing RSS is the primary general-web door and Brave is a last resort.

Install from PyPI

pip install skdev-websearch-mcp          # core install, small
pip install skdev-websearch-mcp[all]     # + browser/OCR/extract extras (multi-GB)

The websearch-mcp console script speaks MCP over stdio:

{ "websearch": { "command": "websearch-mcp" } }

Docker

docker build -t websearch-mcp .
docker run --rm -i websearch-mcp

Keys are passed at run time, never baked in: -e GROQ_API_KEYS=.... Heavy extras: docker build --build-arg EXTRAS="[all]" -t websearch-mcp .

Notes

• Reranker (optional, local): ranking uses a local gte-reranker-modernbert-base cross-encoder over a Unix socket (RERANKER_MODEL overrides the model). Without it, results return unranked with relevance_score 0.0 — everything still works.
• Helium CDP (optional): bot-walled pages escalate to a Chrome DevTools browser at 127.0.0.1:9222 when available; without it those pages return a terminal verdict instead of hanging.
• Caching: fetch results cache for 1h (cache_ttl=0 forces fresh). No database, no state beyond the cache dir.
• Safety: all user-URL fetches are SSRF-validated (private-IP blocking + redirect-hop revalidation + robots.txt gate).
• Groq model split: synthesis + grounding + extract-llm use openai/gpt-oss-120b; rewrite/classify/expand/decompose use openai/gpt-oss-20b (the previous llama-3.1-8b-instant was retired by Groq and now 404s). Constants GROQ_SMART_MODEL/GROQ_CHEAP_MODEL in config.py.
• Keyless lanes (all advisory-only): OSV.dev vuln vertical + NVD CVE enrichment; grep.app MCP code search (Sourcegraph backup); Bing Web RSS + Bing News RSS (Brave's scrape is rate-limited, GDELT 429s from some networks); Wikipedia vertical; Jina Reader pre-CDP tier; Wayback CDX-history recovery in enrich(); Common Crawl domain-survey assist in map_site.
• Local reranker: a gte-reranker-modernbert-base cross-encoder runs as one shared worker over a Unix socket; either server spawns it on demand and it unloads when idle. Optional — without it results are engine-ranked only.
• Optional keys (graceful keyless fallback): SE_KEY/STACKEXCHANGE_KEY (10k/day SE), S2_KEY/S2_API_KEY (dedicated S2 1 RPS).
• Marginalia: best-effort lane only (shared public key pool, 503s under load); independent-index recall, no dedicated key wired (kontakt@marginalia.nu for one).