pi-search

Free, model-agnostic web search for pi. It uses the hosted Exa and Parallel MCP services, the same search strategy used by opencode. No API key is required.

Tools

Tool	Use
web_search	Everyday web discovery with clean, answer-ready excerpts.
web_fetch	Read selected public URLs when search excerpts are insufficient.
web_search_advanced	Filtered Exa searches by category, domain, date, freshness, and context budget.
search_papers	Scholarly publications, preprints, and journal articles through Exa's publication index.

Use semantic queries that describe the ideal page. For broad topics, web_search accepts 2-3 concise queries for Parallel's multi-query search. Search results are excerpt-first; only call web_fetch for exact wording, a full-page analysis, or conflicting results.

Advanced search

web_search_advanced supports Exa's category indexes (news, company, people, publication, personal site, and financial report), domain allow/deny lists, publication date ranges, and maxAgeHours freshness. Set maxAgeHours: 0 to force a live crawl. It defaults to eight results, 10,000 context characters per result, and token-efficient highlights.

search_papers fixes the category to publication and defaults to eight results, 4,000 characters per paper, and highlights. It accepts date ranges, type: "deep" for complex literature reviews, and enableSummary for triage. The publication index does not support domain filters.

Provider selection

web_search and web_fetch select Exa or Parallel deterministically per pi session. Override the basic-tool provider with PI_SEARCH_PROVIDER:

PI_SEARCH_PROVIDER=exa pi
PI_SEARCH_PROVIDER=parallel pi

web_search_advanced and search_papers always use Exa because Parallel has no equivalent filtering or publication index.

Both services have a free tier. Optional EXA_API_KEY and PARALLEL_API_KEY raise rate limits.

A few parameters are backend-specific: web_search.queries and web_fetch.objective / fullContent are honored by Parallel and ignored by Exa, which searches query alone and caps fetch size with maxCharacters. Unused parameters are dropped without error.

Install

pi install npm:@blessium/pi-search

To try it without installing:

pi -e npm:@blessium/pi-search

For a local checkout:

pi install /path/to/pi-search

Test

npm test

Security

The tools send your query text, the current pi session ID, and the active model name to the hosted Exa and Parallel services over HTTPS. The extension makes no filesystem writes, runs no shell commands, and stores no credentials locally. Optional EXA_API_KEY and PARALLEL_API_KEY values are transmitted to the respective service only.

License

MIT