Search

Hooman ships a web_search tool that normalizes results from a single configured search provider. It’s off by default and controlled by the search block in config.json. Each provider page below covers its config options and one example config.

Supported providers

Provider	Runtime id
Brave	brave
Exa	exa
Firecrawl	firecrawl
LiteLLM	litellm
Serper	serper
Tavily	tavily

Shared shape

{
  "search": {
    "enabled": true,
    "provider": "tavily",
    "tavily": { "apiKey": "tvly-..." }
  }
}

• search.enabled (boolean) — turns the web_search tool on or off.
• search.provider — the runtime id of one of the providers above.
• A per-provider block carrying that provider’s own options (usually just apiKey).

The /config in-chat workflow can also set the search provider and its API key — see /config.

Shared search parameters

Regardless of provider, the agent calls web_search with a normalized input shape and gets back normalized results:

Input field	Notes
query	Required search query (max 400 chars).
count	Result count, 1–20 (default 5).
freshness	"day" | "week" | "month" | "year". Mutually exclusive with start_date/end_date.
start_date / end_date	YYYY-MM-DD, must be provided together.
country	Two-letter country code.
safe_search	Boolean.

Every provider returns the same normalized { provider, query, results: [{ title, url, snippet }], metadata } shape; not every provider supports every input field (each provider page notes the gaps).

Search requests use a 20-second timeout by default; firecrawl and litellm get a longer 60-second timeout since a search+scrape round trip can take longer.