Web Search — Feynman Docs

Feynman’s web research tools come from the bundled pi-web-access package. The lead agent, the researcher, and the verifier use them to find and read documentation, blog posts, news, repositories, and open-access papers alongside Feynman’s paper databases.

Tools

Tool	Purpose
`web_search`	Search with one query or a `queries` batch. Supports `numResults`, `recencyFilter` (`day`, `week`, `month`, `year`), `domainFilter` (prefix a domain with `-` to exclude it), `provider`, and `includeContent` to fetch page text for the results
`fetch_content`	Fetch one or more URLs as readable Markdown. Handles web pages, PDFs, GitHub repos, issues, and pull requests, images, and videos. `mode: "raw"` returns the exact text body; `mode: "answer"` with a `prompt` answers a question from the page
`get_search_content`	Read stored results from an earlier search or fetch by `responseId`, paged with `offset` and `limit`, or search them with `findText`
`source_check`	Gather passages for a claim into an evidence artifact for manual review; it does not decide support on its own

Fetched page bodies are stored for one hour in ~/.feynman/agent/web-search-cache/ so get_search_content can page through them without re-fetching.

Default behavior

With no key and no configuration, web_search works through Exa’s hosted MCP endpoint. In auto mode it tries a configured SearXNG endpoint first; when the active model uses openai-codex, it then tries Codex-backed OpenAI search; otherwise it tries Exa before OpenAI, then any other provider you have configured. Browser-cookie access for Gemini Web is off unless you opt in with allowBrowserCookies.

Configuration

Check the current search configuration:

feynman search status

Set a provider, optionally saving its API key:

feynman search set exa <api-key>
feynman search set perplexity <api-key>
feynman search set gemini <api-key>
feynman search set auto

feynman search set supports auto, exa, perplexity, and gemini. It also sets the search workflow to none (raw results, no curator window) and turns browser-cookie access off. feynman search clear resets the provider to auto and keeps saved API keys.

For other providers (Brave, Tavily, Jina, Kagi, Parallel, SearXNG, DuckDuckGo, and more), multi-provider search with provider: "all", fallback routes, proxies, and PDF extraction settings, edit ~/.feynman/agent/web-search.json directly. The pi-web-access README documents every field.

Commands

Command	Description
`/search`	Browse stored web search results from the current session
`/websearch [queries]`	Open the search curator and run searches yourself
`/curator [on\|off]`	Toggle the search curator workflow
`/google-account`	Show the Google account used for Gemini Web

To turn one of these commands off, set commands.<name>.enabled to false in web-search.json (keys: websearch, curator, search, google-account).