researchsearch

researchsearch

researchsearch is a research desk for the web, powered by the Tavily API. It searches with ranked, content-bearing results (and an optional generated answer), pulls the clean text out of specific pages, crawls a site page by page under limits you set, and maps a site's structure so you can see what is there before you read it. It works from the command line or as an MCP server for agents.

A Tavily API key is required. Put it in the TAVILY_API_KEY environment variable; without it, every operation stops with an error that names the missing variable, before any request is made.

Install

export TAVILY_API_KEY="tvly-..."
npx @reneturcios/researchsearch search "composting basics"

Or run the container image:

docker run -i -e TAVILY_API_KEY="tvly-..." ghcr.io/cloudcorprecords/researchsearch

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

CLI

# Search; results print as JSON
researchsearch search "composting basics"
researchsearch search "rate decision" --topic news --days 3 --max-results 5 --answer

# Extract the clean content of one or more pages
researchsearch extract https://example.com/article
researchsearch extract https://example.com/a https://example.com/b --depth advanced

# Crawl a site from a starting page
researchsearch crawl https://example.com --max-depth 2 --limit 25
researchsearch crawl https://example.com --instructions "Focus on the guides"

# Map a site's structure (URLs only, no page content)
researchsearch map https://example.com --max-depth 1 --limit 50

researchsearch --version

Exit codes: 0 on success, 1 when an operation fails (a missing TAVILY_API_KEY, an HTTP error from the service, an unreachable host), 2 for usage errors.

MCP server

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

npx -y @reneturcios/researchsearch mcp

MCP client configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "researchsearch": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@reneturcios/researchsearch", "mcp"],
      "env": {
        "TAVILY_API_KEY": "tvly-..."
      }
    }
  }
}

Tools

Tool	Input	What it returns
tavily-search	query (string, required), search_depth, topic, days, max_results, include_answer, include_raw_content, include_domains, exclude_domains (all optional)	Ranked results with content excerpts and scores, plus a generated answer and raw page content when requested.
tavily-extract	urls (string array, required), extract_depth, include_images, query (optional)	The clean extracted content of each page, with failures reported separately.
tavily-crawl	url (string, required), max_depth, max_breadth, limit, instructions, extract_depth (optional)	The pages visited from the starting URL, each with its extracted content.
tavily-map	url (string, required), max_depth, max_breadth, limit, instructions (optional)	The list of URLs reachable from the starting page, without page content.

Each tool is one call to the matching Tavily API endpoint. Only the parameters you set are sent — unset optionals are omitted so the service applies its own defaults — and each response is the service's JSON, passed back unchanged.

Development

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

License

MIT — see LICENSE.