/firecrawl-search

name: firecrawl-search
description: |
  Web search with full page content extraction, plus routing to Firecrawl's research paper index. Use this skill whenever the user asks to search the web, find articles, research a topic, look something up, find recent news, discover sources, or says "search for", "find me", "look up", "what are people saying about", or "find articles about". Also use it for scientific literature — finding papers, studies, trials, or preprints on PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, or arXiv. Returns real search results with optional full-page markdown — not just snippets. Provides capabilities beyond Claude's built-in WebSearch.
allowed-tools:
  - Bash(firecrawl *)
  - Bash(npx firecrawl *)

firecrawl search

Web search with optional content scraping. Returns search results as JSON, optionally with full page content.

When to use

• You don't have a specific URL yet
• You need to find pages, answer questions, or discover sources
• You need research papers — see [Paper search](#paper-search), which routes to `firecrawl research`, not to `search --categories research`
• First step in the [workflow escalation pattern](firecrawl-cli): search → scrape → map → crawl → interact

Quick start

# Basic search
firecrawl search "your query" -o .firecrawl/result.json --json

# Search and scrape full page content from results
firecrawl search "your query" --scrape -o .firecrawl/scraped.json --json

# News from the past day
firecrawl search "your query" --sources news --tbs qdr:d -o .firecrawl/news.json --json

# Programming question: search GitHub issues, merged PRs, READMEs, and docs
firecrawl search "your query" --categories developer -o .firecrawl/developer.json --json

# Research papers: use the paper index, NOT `search --categories research`
firecrawl research search-papers "your query" -o .firecrawl/papers.json --json

Developer search

`--categories developer` adds an index built for coding agents. It covers GitHub issues, merged pull requests, repository READMEs, and curated documentation sites. Use it for a programming question: an error message, an API contract, a library behaviour, or a known bug.

The hits arrive in their own `data.developer` group beside `data.web`. Each hit holds `url`, `title`, and `description`, where `description` is the matched passage. Read the passages with `jq -r '.data.developer[] | .url, .description' .firecrawl/developer.json`.

The dedicated `firecrawl developer` command searches only that index and keeps the full matched passages:

# Developer search only, with full passages
firecrawl developer "your query" --limit 10 -o .firecrawl/developer.json --json

Each result holds `id`, `type` (`issue`, `pull_request`, `readme`, `doc`), `url`, `title`, and `passages`. Read them with `jq -r '.results[] | .url, .passages[].text' .firecrawl/developer.json`.

Paper search

**`--categories research` is not the paper index.** It only narrows ordinary web results to research-affiliated websites (a short domain allowlist). For actual papers use the `firecrawl research` command group, which searches roughly 43M abstracts, around 90% biomedical (PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv) plus arXiv.

Reach for it on any biomedical, clinical, or scientific-literature question instead of web-searching or scraping PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, or Google Scholar by hand:

# Find papers by topic -- start here, and run several distinct framings
firecrawl research search-papers "CRISPR base editing off-target effects" \
  --limit 20 -o .firecrawl/papers.json --json

# Expand from your strongest hits along the citation graph
firecrawl research related-papers pmid:40953549 --intent "in vivo delivery" \
  -o .firecrawl/papers-related.json --json

# Verify a specific claim against the full text before you cite it
firecrawl research read-paper pmcid:PMC12530322 --question "What was the sample size?" \
  -o .firecrawl/paper-passages.json --json

Paper ids accept `pmid:`, `pmcid:`, `doi:`, and `arxiv:` forms. `inspect-paper` returns canonical metadata for one id. Read hits with `jq -r '.results[] | .primaryId, .title' .firecrawl/papers.json`.

See [firecrawl-cli](../firecrawl-cli/SKILL.md) for how paper search fits the overall command routing.

Options

| Option | Description | | ---------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | `--limit <n>` | Max number of results | | `--sources <web,images,news>` | Source types to search | | `--categories <github,research,pdf,developer>` | Filter by category. `research` = research-affiliated websites (see [Paper search](#paper-search) for the actual paper index); `developer` = the coding-agent index | | `--tbs <qdr:h\|d\|w\|m\|y>` | Time-based search filter | | `--location` | Location for search results | | `--country <code>` | Country code for search