Web Search — Feynman Docs

Feynman’s web search tool retrieves current information from the web during research workflows. It supports multiple simultaneous queries, domain filtering, recency filtering, and optional full-page content retrieval. The researcher agent uses web search alongside AlphaXiv to gather evidence from non-academic sources like blog posts, documentation, news, and code repositories.

Routing modes

Feynman supports three web search backends. You can configure which one to use or let Feynman choose automatically:

Mode	Description
`auto`	Prefer Exa when configured, then Perplexity, then Gemini API
`perplexity`	Force Perplexity Sonar for all web searches
`exa`	Force Exa for all web searches
`gemini`	Force Gemini API grounding

Default behavior

The default path does not read Chromium or Chrome cookies and does not request macOS Keychain access. In auto mode, Feynman uses API-backed search providers when they are configured: Exa first, then Perplexity, then Gemini API.

Configure an explicit API key for Exa, Perplexity, or Gemini in ~/.feynman/web-search.json before running source-heavy workflows like /deepresearch.

Configuration

Check the current search configuration:

feynman search status

Edit ~/.feynman/web-search.json to configure the backend:

{
  "provider": "auto",
  "searchProvider": "auto",
  "exaApiKey": "exa_...",
  "perplexityApiKey": "pplx-...",
  "geminiApiKey": "AIza..."
}

Set provider and searchProvider to auto, exa, perplexity, or gemini. When using auto, Feynman prefers Exa if a key is present, then Perplexity, then Gemini API. You can also run feynman search set <provider> [api-key] to write this file.

Gemini Web browser-cookie access is disabled by default. To opt into that legacy fallback, add "geminiBrowser": true to ~/.feynman/web-search.json. On macOS, that can trigger a Keychain prompt from the browser’s cookie store, so API keys are the recommended route.

Search features

The web search tool supports several capabilities that the researcher agent leverages automatically:

Multiple queries — Send 2-4 varied-angle queries simultaneously for broader coverage of a topic
Domain filtering — Restrict results to specific domains like arxiv.org, github.com, or nature.com
Recency filtering — Filter results by date, useful for fast-moving topics where only recent work matters
Full content retrieval — Fetch complete page content for the most important results rather than relying on snippets

When it runs

Web search is used automatically by researcher agents during workflows. You do not need to invoke it directly. The researcher decides when to use web search versus paper search based on the topic and source availability. Academic topics lean toward AlphaXiv; engineering and applied topics lean toward web search.