SearxSearch Tool

Intent

The searxSearch tool is designed to provide a search capability for AI agents, leveraging a self-hosted SearxNG instance. It allows agents to query the internet and retrieve relevant information, enhancing their ability to answer questions, gather data, and perform tasks that require up-to-date knowledge.

Scope

This tool focuses on:

• Searching: Submitting search queries to a specified SearxNG instance.
• Extracting: Parsing the HTML response from SearxNG to extract relevant information such as URLs, titles, and descriptions of search results.
• Returning Results: Formatting and returning the extracted information in a structured string format.

It does not handle:

• SearxNG Instance Management: The tool assumes a SearxNG instance is already set up and running. It does not provide functionality to install, configure, or manage a SearxNG instance.
• Advanced Search Parameters: The tool uses a basic set of search parameters. It does not expose all the advanced search options that SearxNG might offer.

Use

Initialization

To use the searxSearch tool, you must first initialize it with the base URL of your SearxNG instance. This can be done either by passing the base_url argument to the constructor or by setting the SEARXNG_BASE_URL environment variable.

from sources.tools.searxSearch import searxSearch

# Option 1: Initialize with base_url argument
search_tool = searxSearch(base_url="http://your_searxng_instance.com")

# Option 2: Initialize with SEARXNG_BASE_URL environment variable
import os
os.environ["SEARXNG_BASE_URL"] = "http://your_searxng_instance.com"
search_tool = searxSearch()

If no base URL is provided, the tool will raise a ValueError.

Execution

To execute a search query, call the execute method with a list containing the search query string as the first element.

results = search_tool.execute(["your search query"])
print(results)

The execute method returns a string containing the search results, with each result formatted as:

Title | URL | Description

and results separated by newlines.

Error Handling

The execute method returns an error message as a string in the following cases:

• No search query is provided.
• The search query is empty.
• A network error occurs during the search request.

The execution_failure_check method can be used to check if the execution failed based on the output string. It returns True if the output contains the word "Error", and False otherwise.

Dependencies

The searxSearch tool depends on the following Python libraries:

• requests: For making HTTP requests to the SearxNG instance.
• beautifulsoup4: For parsing the HTML response from SearxNG.

These dependencies can be installed using pip:

pip install requests beautifulsoup4

Environment Variables

• SEARXNG_BASE_URL: The base URL of the SearxNG instance. This variable is optional if the base URL is passed as an argument to the constructor.

Example

from sources.tools.searxSearch import searxSearch
import os

# Ensure the environment variable is set
os.environ["SEARXNG_BASE_URL"] = "http://searx.lan"

# Initialize the tool
search_tool = searxSearch()

# Execute a search query
results = search_tool.execute(["What is the capital of France?"])

# Print the results
print(results)

# Check for errors
if search_tool.execution_failure_check(results):
    print("Search failed.")
else:
    print("Search completed successfully.")