Web Search Skill

Accepts a natural language query, calls the Tavily AI search API, and returns the top matching URLs. Your agent receives those URLs and decides what to do with them — fetch each one, display them, pass them to another skill, etc.

Setup

1. Install the dependency:

pip install tavily-python

2. Set your Tavily API key (free tier: 1,000 searches/month — sign up at https://tavily.com, no credit card required):

# macOS / Linux
export TAVILY_API_KEY="tvly-your-key-here"

# Windows (Command Prompt)
set TAVILY_API_KEY=tvly-your-key-here

# Windows (PowerShell)
$env:TAVILY_API_KEY = "tvly-your-key-here"

3. Optional — cap the number of results (default: 20):

export SYNTHADOC_WEB_SEARCH_MAX_RESULTS=10

Standalone usage

import asyncio
from synthadoc.skills.web_search.scripts.main import WebSearchSkill

skill = WebSearchSkill()

async def main():
    result = await skill.extract("search for: transformer architecture papers")
    urls = result.metadata["child_sources"]   # list[str] — top matching URLs
    query = result.metadata["query"]          # "transformer architecture papers"
    print(f"Found {len(urls)} URLs for '{query}':")
    for url in urls:
        print(" ", url)

asyncio.run(main())

result.text is always empty — the skill is a discovery step that returns URLs, not page content. Pass the URLs to the url or youtube skill (or your own HTTP client) to fetch content.

Intent prefixes

The skill strips a leading intent phrase before sending the query to Tavily:

Input	Query sent to Tavily
search for: RAG evaluation	RAG evaluation
find on the web: LLM benchmarks	LLM benchmarks
look up quantum computing	quantum computing
youtube: Karpathy transformers	Karpathy transformers (YouTube only)
搜索: 深度学习架构	深度学习架构

YouTube-specific prefixes (youtube:, search youtube:, youtube video:, etc.) restrict the Tavily search to youtube.com and youtu.be.

CJK intent phrases supported: 查找, 搜索, 网络搜索, 在网上查, 查一下

Domain filtering

A built-in blocklist skips sites that block automated HTTP clients: reddit.com, medium.com, quora.com, twitter.com/x.com, linkedin.com, wikipedia.org, IEEE Xplore, ACM DL, and common subscription-only academic publishers.

If SYNTHADOC_WIKI_ROOT is set, the skill also loads $SYNTHADOC_WIKI_ROOT/.synthadoc/blocked_domains.json (a JSON array of domain strings) to extend the blocklist at runtime.

Scripts

• scripts/main.py — WebSearchSkill: intent parsing, domain filtering, returns child_sources in metadata
• scripts/fetcher.py — thin async wrapper around AsyncTavilyClient

Assets

• assets/search-providers.json — search provider registry (currently Tavily)

Using with full Synthadoc

When running inside Synthadoc, the Orchestrator reads child_sources from the result metadata and automatically enqueues each URL as a separate ingest job, which are then processed by the url or youtube skill. No additional setup is required beyond the env vars above.