mcp-web-search

A local MCP server that gives Claude web search and page-fetching capabilities — built to work around the network restrictions that Claude organisation accounts operate under.

Why this exists

Claude.ai organisation accounts restrict outbound network access to a fixed domain allowlist. General web search and browsing are blocked and regular members cannot change that. Personal accounts have built-in web search and don't have this problem.

This server runs locally on your machine — where the internet is unrestricted — and proxies web requests back to Claude via the MCP protocol. If you've ever hit host_not_allowed with no way to fix it, this is for you.

What it does

Two tools, nothing more:

Tool	Description
search_list	Search the web via DuckDuckGo and return up to 10 ranked results
access_site	Fetch any URL, follow redirects, and return its content as plain text

Tech stack

Component	Technology	Version
Language	Python	≥ 3.12
MCP framework	FastMCP (mcp package)	≥ 1.28.1
Search backend	DuckDuckGo (ddgs package)	≥ 9.14.4
Package manager	uv	any recent

Architecture

graph TD
    Claude[Claude Desktop] -->|MCP stdio / HTTP| Server[mcp-web-search<br/>FastMCP server]
    Server -->|HTTPS| DDG[DuckDuckGo API]
    Server -->|HTTPS| Web[Any public URL]

Claude calls one of the two tools over MCP. The server makes the outbound request from the local machine (bypassing Claude's network restrictions) and returns structured JSON.

Key design decisions

No authentication on the server Decision: The server accepts all requests without any auth token or API key. Why: It only binds to 127.0.0.1 by default and is intended as a personal local tool — adding auth would be friction with no real security benefit in that context. Do not change because: adding auth here would also require changes to every Claude Desktop config that uses this server.

Raw urllib instead of httpx / requests Decision: access_site uses the stdlib urllib.request only. Why: Avoids an extra dependency for a single HTTP call. ddgs already handles the search transport. Do not change because: it keeps the dependency surface minimal; only revisit if redirect handling or TLS behaviour becomes a problem.

Setup & contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.