citesearch

citesearch

citesearch is a small client for Edgepedia, a standalone encyclopedia corpus of (per its own release notes) some 486,000 articles, each with its own id and credit line. It can search the corpus by subject, read an article or topic in full, list the articles related to one you already have, trace the chain of in-text links between two articles, and pin down which article an ambiguous name refers to when you give it a little surrounding context. One binary serves a command-line interface and a stdio MCP server.

There is no account and no API key. Under the hood, both faces forward each request to the hosted Edgepedia endpoint at https://www.edgechat.ai/mcp and print the text it returns. Articles carry a credit line; where the upstream text includes it, it is shown as returned — please keep it attached wherever you reuse the article text.

Install

npx @reneturcios/citesearch search koala

Or run the container image:

docker run -i ghcr.io/cloudcorprecords/citesearch

The container defaults to the MCP server (see below). Pass CLI arguments to use it as a CLI instead.

CLI

citesearch search Mount Fuji
citesearch fetch ep9kcz7eym
citesearch fetch ep9kcz7eym --no-citations
citesearch related ep9kcz7eym
citesearch connect epStart epTarget
citesearch resolve Jaguar --context "British car maker"

citesearch --version

Results print as plain text — a search returns matching articles with their ids, titles, links and summaries; a fetch returns one article as Markdown with its link, date, topic, license and credit line; a resolve answer names the article meant, its confidence and the alternatives. Exit codes: 0 on success, 1 when the upstream request fails, 2 for usage errors. Arguments are validated before any request is made.

Notes on fetch: with citations on (the default) an article's sources appear as inline links; --no-citations asks for [n] markers instead, which reads about a quarter shorter. The upstream documentation also mentions fetching several ids at once, a single section, a token budget, or only matching passages — but it does not publish parameter names for those controls, so this client does not invent any: fetch takes exactly one id and the citations switch.

MCP server

One bin serves both faces. The mcp subcommand starts a stdio MCP server:

npx -y @reneturcios/citesearch mcp

MCP client configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "citesearch": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@reneturcios/citesearch", "mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Tools

All five tools are read-only and key-free.

Tool	Input	What it returns
search	query (string) — a subject's name, not a question	Matching articles: id, title, link and summary (or the article opening when there is no summary). Other names and misspellings work, and topic phrases return the topic.
fetch	id (string); citations (boolean, optional)	One article as Markdown, with its link, date, topic, license and credit line. A topic's id lists its articles. citations: false swaps inline source links for [n] markers.
related	id (string)	Articles related to it: its topic-mates, a few from each neighbouring topic, and its geography neighbours.
connect	from (string), to (string)	The shortest chain of in-text links from one article to the other (at most 6 hops), with the sentence that makes each hop.
resolve	name (string); context (string, optional)	Which article the name means, with a confidence and the alternatives. For example, "Jaguar" beside "British car maker" is the car company; beside "big cat" it is the animal.

Development

npm install
npm run build   # tsc -> dist/
npm test        # node test runner over test/*.test.ts, no network (fake fetch only)
npm run dev     # run the CLI from source via tsx

License

MIT — see LICENSE. (This license covers this client; Edgepedia article text is under its own license and carries its own credit line.)