🔍 web-search-plus-mcp

Multi-provider web search and extraction MCP server with intelligent auto-routing.

web-search-plus-mcp is the standalone MCP packaging of Web Search Plus. It gives Claude Desktop, NanoBot, Cursor, and other MCP-compatible hosts access to the same Python routing engine family used by the Hermes/OpenClaw Web Search Plus tools.

Version note: web-search-plus-mcp uses its own MCP package version (0.2.1) while tracking the Web Search Plus engine family (v1.7). The Hermes plugin is versioned separately as hermes-web-search-plus v1.7.x.

✨ Features

• 10 search providers — Serper, Brave, Tavily, Exa, Querit, Linkup, Firecrawl, Perplexity, You.com, SearXNG
• 5 extract providers — Firecrawl, Linkup, Tavily, Exa, You.com
• Intelligent auto-routing — scores query intent and picks a provider automatically
• Quality reports — optional routing/result diagnostics
• Research mode — opt-in multi-provider search + top-source extraction with a time budget
• Zero-install run — uvx web-search-plus-mcp
• MCP-native — stdio server exposing web_search and web_extract

🚀 Quick Start

# Run instantly with uvx
uvx web-search-plus-mcp

# Or install globally
pip install web-search-plus-mcp
web-search-plus-mcp

At least one provider credential is required for search. Extraction needs at least one extraction-capable provider key.

⚙️ Claude Desktop Config

Add this to Claude Desktop's config file:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\\Claude\\claude_desktop_config.json
• Linux: ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "web-search-plus": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["web-search-plus-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "LINKUP_API_KEY": "your_linkup_key",
        "TAVILY_API_KEY": "your_tavily_key",
        "EXA_API_KEY": "your_exa_key",
        "FIRECRAWL_API_KEY": "your_firecrawl_key",
        "BRAVE_API_KEY": "your_brave_key",
        "SERPER_API_KEY": "your_serper_key",
        "QUERIT_API_KEY": "your_querit_key",
        "PERPLEXITY_API_KEY": "your_perplexity_key",
        "YOU_API_KEY": "your_you_key",
        "SEARXNG_INSTANCE_URL": "https://your-searxng-instance.example.com"
      }
    }
  }
}

You can also place a .env file next to the package/project with the same variables.

🔎 Search Providers

• Serper — Google-style facts, news, shopping, local queries
• Brave — general-purpose independent web index
• Tavily — research and analysis
• Exa — semantic discovery, similarity, deep/deep-reasoning synthesis
• Querit — multilingual, real-time AI search
• Linkup — source-backed grounding/citations
• Firecrawl — web search plus scrape-ready content
• Perplexity — direct synthesized answers
• You.com — LLM-ready real-time snippets
• SearXNG — privacy-first self-hosted meta-search

📄 Extract Providers

• Linkup — recommended first choice for clean markdown and low cost
• Firecrawl — robust scrape fallback, useful for JS-heavy/blocked pages
• Tavily — extraction/content API
• Exa — contents API
• You.com — LLM-ready snippets/content where available

🛠 MCP Tool Reference

This MCP server exposes web_search and web_extract. The Hermes plugin exposes the same capability as web_search_plus and web_extract_plus; the names differ because MCP and Hermes use different tool surfaces.

web_search

Parameters:

• query — required search query
• provider — auto, serper, brave, tavily, exa, querit, linkup, firecrawl, perplexity, you, searxng
• count — results to return, default 5, max 20
• depth — Exa depth: normal, deep, deep-reasoning
• time_range — hour, day, week, month, year
• include_domains / exclude_domains — domain allow/deny lists
• mode — normal or research
• quality_report — include routing/result diagnostics
• research_time_budget — best-effort wall-clock budget for research mode

Example MCP arguments:

{
  "query": "latest Hermes Agent release",
  "provider": "linkup",
  "count": 5,
  "quality_report": true
}

web_extract

Parameters:

• urls — required list of URLs
• provider — auto, firecrawl, linkup, tavily, exa, you
• format — markdown or html
• include_images — include image metadata when supported
• include_raw_html — include raw HTML when supported
• render_js — render JavaScript before extraction when supported

Example MCP arguments:

{
  "urls": ["https://example.com"],
  "provider": "linkup",
  "format": "markdown"
}

🧠 Auto-Routing Examples

• iPhone 16 Pro price → Serper/Brave shopping-style search
• how does TCP/IP work → Tavily research-style search
• latest multilingual EV market updates → Querit/Linkup real-time/source-backed search
• companies like Stripe → Exa discovery search
• what is quantum computing → Perplexity/You.com direct-answer style search
• privacy focused search results → SearXNG when configured

Credits

Built on the Web Search Plus routing logic originally developed for OpenClaw/Clawhub and later ported to Hermes as hermes-web-search-plus.

License

MIT © 2026 robbyczgw-cla