Overview
Thesearch_web tool provides web search functionality powered by Exa AI, returning structured results with URLs, titles, highlights, and optional text content.
Setup
An Exa API key is required to use this tool. Run/onboarding in loaf to configure your API key.
search_web
Search the web with Exa and return answer-ready results with URLs and highlights.Parameters
Search query text.
Exa search mode:
auto- Automatically select best modefast- Quick keyword searchneural- AI-powered semantic searchdeep- Most thorough semantic search
Number of results to return (1-25).
Include crawled text snippets in result rows when available.
Include Exa highlights (enabled by default).
Optional query used specifically for highlight extraction. Defaults to the main query.
Number of sentences per highlight snippet (1-8).
How many highlight snippets per URL (1-8).
Optional domain allowlist (e.g.,
["github.com", "docs.python.org"]).Optional domain denylist (e.g.,
["example.com"]).Usage Examples
Result Format
Each result includes:Search Modes
auto (default)
Automatically selects the best search mode based on your query.fast
Quick keyword-based search. Best for:- Specific terms or phrases
- Known entities
- Fast results
neural
AI-powered semantic search. Best for:- Conceptual queries
- Natural language questions
- Related content discovery
deep
Most thorough semantic search. Best for:- Complex research queries
- Comprehensive results
- When quality matters more than speed
Highlights
Highlights are the most relevant excerpts from each page, extracted by Exa’s AI:- Automatically identifies key passages that answer your query
- Configurable snippet length (
highlight_sentences) - Multiple highlights per URL (
highlights_per_url) - Optional separate highlight query for refined extraction
Domain Filtering
Control which domains are included or excluded:Text Content
Wheninclude_text: true, results include crawled page content:
- Full text snippets from the page (up to 2000 characters)
- Useful for direct content analysis
- Combined with highlights for comprehensive context
Rate Limits and Quotas
The search_web tool is subject to Exa API rate limits and quotas based on your API plan. Check your Exa dashboard for current limits.Error Handling
The tool returns an error if:- No API key is configured
- The query is empty
- Exa API returns an error (rate limit, invalid key, etc.)
/onboarding in loaf.