Replace and Improve Web Search with Tavily API

Summary

https://docs.tavily.com/welcome

Here's a summary of what's on the Tavily Docs Welcome page at https://docs.tavily.com/welcome:

🔍 Tavily — Web Search for AI

Tavily provides a suite of web APIs designed for AI/LLM applications. Here's what's available:

Installation

Python SDK: pip install tavily-python
JavaScript SDK: npm i @tavily/core

Core APIs

API	Description	Example
Search	Search the web	`tavily_client.search("Who is Leo Messi?")`
Extract	Extract content from a specific URL	`tavily_client.extract("https://en.wikipedia.org/...")`
Crawl	Crawl a site with natural language instructions	`tavily_client.crawl("https://docs.tavily.com", instructions="...")`
Map	Map all pages of a website	`tavily_client.map("https://docs.tavily.com")`
Research	Run an autonomous research task	`tavily_client.research("Latest developments in AI?")`

Developer Resources

API Credits Overview — How credits are consumed
Rate Limits — Policies and limits
Playground — Interactive API testing
LLMs.txt — Guidance for LLM integrations
Status Page — Service health
Community — Support and discussion

All APIs use a simple client pattern: instantiate TavilyClient with your API key (tvly-YOUR_API_KEY) and call the relevant method. Would you like to dive deeper into any specific API or integrate Tavily into a project?

can you add this to your web search functionality, replacing duckduckog?

Let me read the relevant skill files first to understand the current setup.

Now I need to know your Tavily API key to proceed. Do you have one? If so, I'll update the skill to use Tavily's Search API instead of DuckDuckGo.

A few options for storing the key:

Environment variable — TAVILY_API_KEY in your shell profile (recommended)
A local config file — e.g. ~/.pi/agent/skills/web-search/.env

Which do you prefer, and what's your API key?

shell profile is fine

What's your Tavily API key?

i will add it ogm

No problem! Once you've added TAVILY_API_KEY to your shell profile, I'll update the skill. Let me do that now.

Done! Here's what changed:

search.js — now calls the Tavily /search API (POST https://api.tavily.com/search) using your TAVILY_API_KEY env var, with the same -n flag for result count
SKILL.md — updated description and added the TAVILY_API_KEY requirement

Once you've added the key to your shell profile and reloaded it (source ~/.bashrc / source ~/.zshrc), it'll work automatically.

try it out

Works perfectly! Tavily returned 5 clean results with titles, URLs, and snippets. The API key is set correctly and the switch from DuckDuckGo is fully working. 🎉

https://docs.tavily.com/documentation/api-reference/introduction

go deeper into this and prepare a better search tool. only search, no extra tools

The page is JS-rendered. Let me fetch the actual search API endpoint docs directly via the Tavily API itself, and also try a curl approach to get the raw content.

Now I have a solid picture of all the parameters. Let me write the improved search tool:

Now let's test a few of the new options:

Works beautifully. Here's what was upgraded:

New flags added

Flag	What it does
`-d <depth>`	`basic` / `advanced` / `fast` / `ultra-fast` — controls latency vs. relevance
`-t <topic>`	`general` / `news` / `finance` — topic-scoped search
`-r <range>`	`day` / `week` / `month` / `year` — time filter
`--answer`	Includes Tavily's AI-generated answer at the top
`--raw`	Returns raw page content per result
`--include <d,d>`	Restrict results to specific domains
`--exclude <d,d>`	Block specific domains from results
`--json`	Dumps the full raw JSON response

Also now uses the proper Authorization: Bearer header (the new auth standard from the docs), and shows a relevance score per result.

Try it out again

Working great! The advanced depth, news topic, weekly time range, and AI answer all fired correctly. Results are fresh (Feb 26–27, 2026) with relevance scores per result. The tool is solid.