free-search-mcp

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/354b522a-ef6b-4547-bb07-c80c6268a5e8

Music: “Ethereal Space (cdk Mix)” by cdk, ccmixter.org/files/cdk/34151, licensed CC BY 3.0.

free-search-mcp is a local-first Model Context Protocol server that needs no API key. It lets any LLM (Claude, GPT, a local Ollama model, …) search the web, fetch and clean up pages, and read documents, and you never sign up for a search API.

It combines ideas from several open-source MCP servers in one Python package, and adds the output shaping for LLMs and the reliability work that each of them lacked.

research("how does reciprocal rank fusion work", depth=3)
   ↓
# Research brief: how does reciprocal rank fusion work
_engines: duckduckgo, bing, anysearch · sources: 3 · ~3,400 tokens_

## Sources
- [1] Reciprocal rank fusion | Elasticsearch Reference — <https://…>
- [2] Hybrid Search Scoring (RRF) | Microsoft Learn — <https://…>
- [3] RRF explained in 4 mins — Medium — <https://…>

## Documents
…full Markdown bodies of each page, ready for the LLM to read…

That was one tool call. It returned three sources with their full text, and no API key was involved.

Quick start

You need uv and nothing else: no sign-up, no API key, no clone.

In Claude Code, inside a session:

/plugin marketplace add sweetcornna/free-search-mcp
/plugin install free-search@free-search-mcp

In Codex:

codex plugin marketplace add sweetcornna/free-search-mcp
codex plugin add free-search@free-search-mcp

(In Codex, a [mcp_servers.search] entry left in ~/.codex/config.toml by an earlier codex mcp add silently shadows the plugin's server. Remove it with codex mcp remove search.)

The plugin brings the 11 tools, the verified-research skill (how to check a snippet against its page and its date) and, in Claude Code, the free-search:quick-search agent, all pinned to one version. /plugin update free-search moves to the next release.

Optionally, install Chromium once for the browser-rendered engines (brave, startpage, zhihu, …) and JavaScript-heavy pages. Everything else works without it, and a call that needs it returns this command as its error:

uvx --from free-search-mcp playwright install chromium

Claude Desktop, other clients, a source checkout and Docker are under Install.

Why this exists

	Multi-engine	No API key	Smart fallback	PDF/DOCX	FTS5 cache	Filters	Trafilatura	LLM-tuned
nickclyde/duckduckgo-mcp-server	✗	✓	✗	✗	✗	✗	✗	~
mrkrsl/web-search-mcp	✓	✓	✓	✗	✗	✗	✗	~
Aas-ee/open-webSearch	✓	✓	~	✗	✗	✗	✗	~
VincentKaufmann/noapi-google-search-mcp	✗	✓	✓	✓	✓	✗	✗	~
free-search-mcp	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓

"LLM-tuned" means Markdown-first output with token estimates, errors that name the next step, and a research() that turns a search and its fetches into one call. docs/HOW_IT_WORKS.md explains the less obvious columns.

Tools (11)