The web search tool enables agents to search the internet and retrieve information.
Overview
The web search tool provides:
- Multiple search engine backends
- Result aggregation and ranking
- Web page content extraction
- Rate limiting and caching
Parameters
Number of results to return (default: 5, max: 10)
Whether to fetch full page content (default: false)
Example
{
"query": "ZeroClaw Rust agent framework",
"num_results": 5,
"fetch_content": true
}
Response
Brief description or excerpt
Full page content (if fetch_content=true)
Example Response
{
"results": [
{
"title": "ZeroClaw - GitHub",
"url": "https://github.com/zeroclaw-labs/zeroclaw",
"snippet": "Fast, small, and fully autonomous AI agent framework",
"content": "ZeroClaw is a lightweight Rust framework..."
}
]
}
Search Backends
DuckDuckGo (Default)
Google Custom Search
Brave Search
Privacy-focused search with no API key required.Features:
- No tracking
- No API key needed
- Good for general queries
- Rate limited
Google’s programmable search engine.Setup:export GOOGLE_API_KEY="your-api-key"
export GOOGLE_CSE_ID="your-cse-id"
- High quality results
- Site-specific search
- Advanced operators
- Requires API key
Privacy-first search API.Setup:export BRAVE_API_KEY="your-api-key"
- Privacy-focused
- No user tracking
- Good coverage
- Requires API key
Configuration
[tools]
web_search_enabled = true
search_backend = "duckduckgo" # or "google", "brave"
max_search_results = 10
[tools.search]
cache_ttl_seconds = 3600
request_timeout_seconds = 10
user_agent = "ZeroClaw/0.1.8"
Rate Limiting
To avoid overwhelming search engines:
- DuckDuckGo: 1 request per second
- Google: 100 queries per day (free tier)
- Brave: 2000 queries per month (free tier)
Results are cached for 1 hour by default.
When fetch_content=true, the tool:
- Fetches the full HTML page
- Extracts main content (removes ads, navigation)
- Converts HTML to plain text or markdown
- Truncates to 10,000 characters
Fetching content significantly increases response time and may trigger rate limits.
Security
- HTTPS enforcement
- Domain allowlist (optional)
- Content size limits
- Request timeouts
- XSS prevention in extracted content
[security]
web_search_allowed_domains = [
"*.github.com",
"*.wikipedia.org",
"docs.rs"
]
Examples
Quick Search
zeroclaw agent -m "Search for Rust async best practices"
Fetch Full Content
zeroclaw agent -m "Find and summarize the latest Rust 1.87 release notes"
Source Code
Implementation: src/tools/web_search.rs