Toolsquery
Search Engine
Web search via a self-hosted SearXNG instance (SerpAPI kept as an inactive fallback).
tool name: search_engine
Performs a web search with country, language, recency, pagination, and result-type controls.
The active backend is a self-hosted SearXNG instance (ai.searxng_url) — free, no per-query cost. The older SerpAPI implementation (ai.search_api_key) stays in the code as an inactive fallback.
Results are titles, links and short snippets. When a snippet is not enough, open the result's link with Read URL to read the page itself.
On a connection error or HTTP 403 the SearXNG container is usually down — pair this with Restart Search Engine.
Parameters
| Name | Type | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| query | string | yes | The search query string. |
| num | number | — | Number of results (default: 5, max: 100). |
| start | number | — | Pagination offset (0 = first page, 10 = second page). |
| gl | string | — | Country code (ISO 3166-1 alpha-2), e.g. "br", "us", "de". |
| hl | string | — | Language code, e.g. "pt-br", "en". |
| time_period | stringpast_hour, past_day, past_week, past_month, past_year | — | Recency filter. |
| search_type | stringweb, news, images, video | — | Search type (default: "web"). |