| name | genius-web-search |
| skill_type | skill |
| description | Multi-provider web search via Genius Agent — get ranked titles, snippets, and URLs for a query from DuckDuckGo, Google, Bing, or Searxng. Use when the agent needs current, real-time information from the open web, references/links to authoritative pages, or a candidate set of URLs to then crawl. Do NOT use to read the full body of a page (use genius-web-crawl) or to persist results into the knowledge graph (use genius-search-ingest). |
| license | MIT |
| tags | ["genius","web","search","duckduckgo","google","bing","searxng","mcp"] |
| metadata | {"author":"Genius","version":"0.1.0"} |
Genius Web Search
Run web searches across pluggable providers and get back structured hits
(title, link, snippet). Provider is auto-selected from the environment;
DuckDuckGo is the zero-config default.
When to use
- Answer a question that needs up-to-date / real-time information.
- Find authoritative references or a candidate set of URLs on a topic.
- Produce the seed URLs that
genius-web-crawl will then read in full.
When NOT to use
- Read or extract the full markdown body of a page →
genius-web-crawl.
- Persist the hits into the epistemic-graph KG →
genius-search-ingest
(or its genius_ingest_search tool, which searches and ingests in one call).
- Deep multi-source, adversarially-verified research reports → the
deep-research skill.
Prerequisites & environment
Genius Agent bundles the universal-skills[web-search] scripts. Provider is
chosen by which credentials are present (first match wins):
| Variable(s) | Provider | Notes |
|---|
| (none) | DuckDuckGo | Free, no key — the default fallback |
SEARXNG_URL | Searxng | Self-hosted / public metasearch instance |
GOOGLE_API_KEY + GOOGLE_CX | Google | Custom Search API + engine id |
BING_API_KEY | Bing | Bing Web Search API |
SSL_VERIFY | (all) | Toggle TLS verification (default on) |
Connect via the mcp-client skill against the genius-agent MCP server, or
call the bundled scripts directly.
Tools & actions
- Dispatcher (auto-selects provider):
scripts/search.py --query "<q>" --json
- Provider-specific:
scripts/search_duckduckgo.py, scripts/search_google.py,
scripts/search_bing.py, scripts/search_searxng.py.
Key parameters
--query — required; the search string.--max-results / --max_results — cap the hit count (default 10).--json — emit machine-readable results (list of {title, link, snippet}).--insecure — disable TLS verification (prefer SSL_VERIFY env).
Recipes
Auto-provider search, JSON out:
python scripts/search.py --query "cilium eBPF service mesh 2026" --max-results 8 --json
Force DuckDuckGo (no keys needed):
python scripts/search_duckduckgo.py --query "openraft vs multi-paxos" --max-results 5 --json
Searxng against a self-hosted instance:
SEARXNG_URL=https://searx.example.org python scripts/search_searxng.py --query "OWL RDF reasoner benchmark" --json
Gotchas
- Result fields are
title, link, snippet — note link, not url
(the ingest mapper normalizes both).
- DuckDuckGo's instant-answer API is sparse for some queries; if you get few
hits, configure Searxng/Google/Bing for fuller coverage.
- Keep
--max-results modest to avoid burning tokens on low-value snippets.
- Set keys via the environment, never on the command line, to avoid leaking
them into process listings / logs.
Related
genius-web-crawl — read the full body of the URLs this returns.genius-search-ingest — search + persist hits as KG :SearchResult/:Document.web-search (universal) — the underlying provider scripts.
