pi-ketch-web-access

Unlimited web search for your AI agent. No API keys. No rate limits with SearXNG. No MCP server.

Four native tools — web_search, web_scrape, web_docs, web_code — that give your pi agent the web.

pi install npm:pi-ketch-web-access

Why Ketch? Because SearXNG

Ketch supports SearXNG as a search backend — a free, open-source metasearch engine aggregating 269 search services (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Wikipedia, arXiv, and 264 more). Zero tracking. Zero profiling. No filter bubbles — unpersonalized results, not shaped by ad targeting. SearXNG also strips tracking parameters from result URLs.

Self-host it on your local machine, a $5/month VPS, or a Raspberry Pi running Docker. SearXNG gives you search across general, images, videos, news, maps, music, IT, science, and more.

• No API keys — no signups, no tokens to rotate, no billing
• No rate limits — unlimited programmatic access from your own instance. Upstream engines may throttle; results still arrive from the rest
• No filter bubble — unpersonalized results, not shaped by ad targeting

Ketch also supports Brave, DuckDuckGo, and Exa as alternative search backends (rate-limited; API keys may apply). Note: Brave is ketch's default backend — configure SearXNG to unlock unlimited self-hosted search.

Four tools. Zero friction

| Tool | What it does | When to use it | |------|-------------|----------------| | web_search | Search the web. Set scrape: true to find and read pages in one call | General queries. Avoids the two-call round-trip that burns rate limits | | web_scrape | URL → clean markdown. Auto-detects JS-rendered pages, re-fetches via headless Chrome (requires ketch browser install) | You already have a URL. Cached results stale? noCache: true | | web_docs | Context7 version-aware documentation lookup (free tier; API key recommended for heavy use) | Library/framework API questions. Stops hallucination from stale training data | | web_code | grep.app search across 1M+ open-source repos | Finding real implementation patterns. Language filtering |

Every tool returns structured JSON. Every parameter is typed. Every tool ships with promptGuidelines that route the agent to the right tool without you writing a single line of prompt engineering.

Why an extension, not a skill?

Skills provide instructions; extensions register tools. This extension turns ketch CLI commands into native pi tools with typed parameters and structured output. The LLM calls them directly — no CLI syntax to fumble.

Install

Prerequisites:

• pi installed
• ketch CLI on $PATH
• (Optional) ketch browser install — enables JS-rendered page scraping for web_scrape
• (Optional) Install and configure SearXNG — unlocks unlimited self-hosted search

Install:

pi install npm:pi-ketch-web-access

Usage

No skill configuration. No prompt engineering. Install it and the four tools are available to your agent immediately.

"What's the latest Node.js LTS release date?"

→ Agent calls web_search

"How do I use the Zod v4 transform API?"

→ Agent calls web_docs — built-in routing tells it to prefer docs over search for library questions

"Show me a real implementation of a Rust async runtime"

→ Agent calls web_code with lang: "rust" — it knows code search beats web search for implementation examples

"Scrape https://example.com and extract the pricing table"

→ Agent calls web_scrape — JS-rendered? Headless Chrome handles it automatically

"Find and summarize the top 3 articles about MCP servers"

→ Agent calls web_search with scrape: true — find and read in one call, not two