searxng-web-research

name	searxng-web-research
description	Use when an agent needs lightweight web research by searching with searxng-cli and reading webpage content without browser automation.
allowed-tools	Bash(searxng-cli:*), Bash(go:*)

SearXNG Web Research

Overview

This skill gives agents a two-step workflow:

1. use search to discover candidate URLs, 2) use read to extract clean page content.

Core rule: search first, then read. If the URL is already known, run read directly.

When to Use

• Need quick source discovery from the open web
• Need clean article/page text for summarization or comparison
• Need non-interactive retrieval (no login, no clicking UI flows)

Do not use this skill when:

• The task requires login, form submission, or interactive navigation
• The content only exists after heavy client-side JavaScript rendering

Quick Start

If searxng-cli is on PATH:

searxng-cli search "golang context cancellation best practices"
searxng-cli read "https://go.dev/blog/context"

If running from this repository without installing the binary:

go run . search "golang context cancellation best practices"
go run . read "https://go.dev/blog/context"

Core Workflow

1) Search phase (discover candidates)

searxng-cli search "<query>"

Common flags:

• --limit <n>: local output row limit (default 10)
• --template "...": custom per-row template

Output is a Markdown table with fixed columns:

• # | title | url | content | template

2) Read phase (extract target page)

searxng-cli read "<url>"

Common flags:

• --format markdown|text (default markdown)
• --timeout 10s
• --respect-robots=true|false
• --max-bytes 2097152
• --retry 1

Recommended Patterns

• Known URL: skip search and run read directly
• Multi-source validation:
  1. collect 3-5 candidate URLs with search
  2. extract each page via read --format text
  3. deduplicate claims and cross-check sources
• Prefer high-quality sources: official docs, standards, and reputable publishers

Auth and Config

For authenticated SearXNG instances, pass global auth flags (values are base64-encoded):

searxng-cli --auth-mode api_key --auth-header "X-API-Key" --auth-api-key "<base64>" search "<query>"

Config precedence is stable: flags > env > config > defaults.

Failure Handling

Errors are written to stderr as structured key=value lines.

Typical cases:

• NETWORK_TIMEOUT: increase --timeout or retry later
• HTTP_NON_2XX: validate upstream health, URL, and auth config
• ROBOTS_DISALLOWED: follow site policy; disable robots checks only when explicitly allowed
• EXTRACT_EMPTY: try another URL or compare with --format text

Verification Checklist

• searxng-cli search --help shows search usage
• searxng-cli read --help shows read usage
• searxng-cli search "test" prints a Markdown result table
• searxng-cli read "https://example.com" returns readable content

Security Notes

• Do not include secrets in CLI arguments unless required.
• Keep robots checks enabled by default.
• This skill is intentionally non-interactive; use browser automation skills for UI workflows.