No-API-key web search, page fetching and document reading across many engines. Local-first.
Quick Install
Automated & IDE SetupCopy the AI prompt to install this server into Claude Code, Cursor, or another agent — or use 1-click editor setup below.
One-click editor setup isn’t available for this listing yet — we don’t have a confirmed install command, and we’d rather show nothing than point your editor at the wrong package or host. Follow the project’s own setup instructions, linked above.
Manual Client & Custom JSON ConfigExpand JSON ▾
No confirmed setup config for this listing yet. We only publish a config block when the install details come from the project itself — its README, its docs, or a verified owner. We haven’t found those for Free Search, and we’d rather show nothing than a guess you’d paste into your client. Follow the project’s own setup instructions for the current steps.
Documentation Overview
free-search-mcp
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/354b522a-ef6b-4547-bb07-c80c6268a5e8
Music: “Ethereal Space (cdk Mix)” by cdk, ccmixter.org/files/cdk/34151, licensed CC BY 3.0.
free-search-mcp is a local-first Model Context Protocol server that needs no API key. It lets any LLM (Claude, GPT, a local Ollama model, …) search the web, fetch and clean up pages, and read documents, and you never sign up for a search API.
It combines ideas from several open-source MCP servers in one Python package, and adds the output shaping for LLMs and the reliability work that each of them lacked.
That was one tool call. It returned three sources with their full text, and no API key was involved.
Quick start
You need uv and nothing else: no sign-up, no API key, no clone.
In Claude Code, inside a session:
In Codex:
(In Codex, a [mcp_servers.search] entry left in ~/.codex/config.toml by an
earlier codex mcp add silently shadows the plugin's server. Remove it with
codex mcp remove search.)
The plugin brings the 11 tools, the verified-research skill (how to check a
snippet against its page and its date) and, in Claude Code, the
free-search:quick-search agent, all pinned to one version.
/plugin update free-search moves to the next release.
Optionally, install Chromium once for the browser-rendered engines (brave,
startpage, zhihu, …) and JavaScript-heavy pages. Everything else works
without it, and a call that needs it returns this command as its error:
Claude Desktop, other clients, a source checkout and Docker are under Install.
Why this exists
| Multi-engine | No API key | Smart fallback | PDF/DOCX | FTS5 cache | Filters | Trafilatura | LLM-tuned | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
nickclyde/duckduckgo-mcp-server | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ~ |
mrkrsl/web-search-mcp | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ~ |
Aas-ee/open-webSearch | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ~ |
VincentKaufmann/noapi-google-search-mcp | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ~ |
| free-search-mcp | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
"LLM-tuned" means Markdown-first output with token estimates, errors that name
the next step, and a research() that turns a search and its fetches into one
call. docs/HOW_IT_WORKS.md explains the less obvious
columns.
Tools (11)
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
search(query, ...filters) | Parallel multi-engine search, RRF-merged, title-fuzzy + host-canonical deduped, with optional extractive lead_snippet |
research(question, depth?, ...filters) | One-shot: search + fetch top N + return Markdown brief |
paper_graph(paper, direction?, limit?) | Walk one paper's citation graph: references, citing works ranked by influence, and Crossref retraction/correction notices. Takes a DOI, an OpenAlex ID, an exact title, or an arXiv reference (arXiv:1706.03762, an arxiv.org/abs/… URL, a 10.48550/arXiv.… DOI, or a bare id such as 1706.03762, 2401.12345v3 or hep-th/9901001 when it is the whole input) |
compare(question, urls=[2..5]) | Concurrent fetch of 2-5 URLs, side-by-side excerpts keyed by question |
fetch(url, render?, inline?, ...) | Fetch any resource: reader-mode Markdown for pages, parsed text for documents, or a description (type/size/dimensions/sha256) for images and binaries. inline=True returns the image itself for vision models |
fetch_batch(urls, ...) | Concurrent multi-URL fetch (max 20 per call) |
read_doc(source, start?, length?, ...) | Parse PDF / DOCX / XLSX / PPTX / EPUB / CSV / code / zip-tar / HTML / TXT / MD with pagination |
extract_structured(url, ...) | Pull JSON-LD / OpenGraph / Twitter cards / microdata via extruct. Long prose fields (articleBody and the like) are clipped, and the result says so in trimmed. This tool returns metadata; use fetch for the text |
cache_search(query, limit?, ...) | FTS5 search across previously fetched pages |
engines(group?) | The source tree (group, then sub-group, then engine), one line each. group is an enum of the groups that own engines, so a typo fails schema validation |
download(url, ...) | Save a file to ${SEARCH_MCP_CACHE_DIR}/downloads by default; files auto-delete after 24h. Set SEARCH_MCP_DOWNLOAD_ENABLED=false to disable it. |
There are also 5 MCP prompts and 2 resource templates (cache://page/{url},
cache://search/{query_hash}). A twelfth tool, ask, appears only when an
answer backend is configured (see Delegating a lookup).
search and research take these filters:
| Param | Values | Effect |
|---|---|---|
freshness | day / week / month / year | Only results from the last N. Results with no date are kept, and freshness_note says when that is most of them. day / week also add googlenews |
include_domains | ["python.org", "djangoproject.com"] | Restrict to these domains |
exclude_domains | ["pinterest.com"] | Remove these |
category | a group (paper, finance, news, software, security, weather, …) or a sub-group (paper.biomed, finance.filings, finance.fx, software.python, dataset.ml, …) | Routes to the sources that natively index that kind of thing; the enum in the tool schema lists every value |
include_text | "async" | Substring required in title/snippet |
exclude_text | "beginner" | Substring forbidden |
max_age_hours | 24 | Accept a cached answer only if it is younger than this. Default 7 days; the tightest of this, the freshness window's TTL, the 6-hour news cap and the category's own cap (weather, finance.fx 1 hour; software, security 6 hours) wins |
Output is Markdown by default, with provenance and a token estimate in the
header. format="json" returns structured data.
How a search runs
- A search that names no engines asks a small keyless pool:
duckduckgo,bing,anysearchandmojeek.googlenewsjoins when recency is asked for, andso360when the query is written in Chinese. category=routes to sources that index that kind of thing (papers, filings, datasets, packages, CVEs, …). Record sources such aspypi,nvdoropenmeteoalso join by themselves when the question is one they can answer directly.- An engine that serves a CAPTCHA, a login wall or an off-topic page is
benched, a reserve takes its seat, and the response says what happened. A
proxy (
SEARCH_MCP_PROXY) is the fix for IP gating. - Every result says how old it is and where its date came from, so the agent can tell a lead from a checked fact.
engines()prints the whole source tree.engines=["so360", "baidu"]runs exactly the engines named.
No engine that a search reaches by itself needs a key. The details, with measurements, are in docs/HOW_IT_WORKS.md; walls and proxies in docs/PROXY_AND_GATES.md; a tour of the tools with examples in docs/USAGE.md.
Install
The plugin in Quick start is the recommended path, because the server is pinned to the plugin's version and updates with it. The other routes run the same server:
| Where | How |
|---|---|
| Claude Desktop | open free-search-mcp-<version>.mcpb from the latest release |
| MCP Registry | io.github.sweetcornna/free-search-mcp |
| Claude Code, without the plugin | claude mcp add search -s user -- uvx free-search-mcp |
| Codex, without the plugin | codex mcp add search -- uvx free-search-mcp |
| Any other MCP client | the stdio command uvx free-search-mcp |
| Docker | docker compose build, then docker compose run --rm search-mcp |
A source checkout with Chromium, a smoke test and client registration in one step:
Over HTTP, uvx free-search-mcp --transport streamable-http --port 8000
serves http://127.0.0.1:8000/mcp. That endpoint has no authentication and
fetches any URL for whoever reaches it, so keep it on loopback or put an
authenticating proxy in front.
The JSON for Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, Continue and Zed, the installer's options and the plugin's token cost are in docs/INSTALL.md. Operating rules for agents are in docs/AGENT_USAGE.md.
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