Firecrawl Build Search

Use this when the application starts with a query, not a URL.

Use This When

• the user asks a question and the product must discover sources first
• the feature needs current web results
• you want to turn a search query into a shortlist of pages for later scraping

Default Recommendations

• Use /search first when URL discovery is part of the product behavior.
• Keep search and extraction conceptually separate unless scraping search results is clearly required.
• Prefer selective follow-up extraction over broad hydration when cost or latency matters.

Common Product Patterns

• answer generation with cited sources
• company, competitor, or topic discovery
• research workflows that produce a shortlist of web pages before deeper extraction
• query-to-URL pipelines for later /scrape or /interact

Note that "research workflow" here means discovering web pages. If the product is searching published papers, that is a different surface — see the escalation rules below.

Escalation Rules

• If you already have the URL, use firecrawl-build-scrape.
• If the result page then requires clicks or form interaction, escalate to firecrawl-build-interact.
• If the feature searches published research papers — biomedical, clinical, and life-science literature (PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv) or arXiv preprints — /search is the wrong surface. Use the research paper index instead: firecrawl-research-index. Passing categories: ["research"] to /search does not query that index; it filters an ordinary web search to research-affiliated websites (the list includes PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, and publisher sites) and returns page results from them — no abstract search, related-paper expansion, or full-text passages.
• If the feature answers developer questions from issues, pull requests, READMEs, or documentation pages, use the developer index instead: firecrawl-developer-index. The same caveat applies to categories: ["developer"].

Implementation Notes

• Treat /search as discovery, ranking, and source selection.
• Be explicit about whether the product needs snippets, URLs, or full result content.
• Keep the query contract stable so downstream scraping logic stays predictable.

Docs (Source of Truth)

Read the source-of-truth page for your project language before writing integration code:

• Node / TypeScript: docs.firecrawl.dev/agent-source-of-truth/node
• Python: docs.firecrawl.dev/agent-source-of-truth/python
• Rust: docs.firecrawl.dev/agent-source-of-truth/rust
• Java: docs.firecrawl.dev/agent-source-of-truth/java
• Elixir: docs.firecrawl.dev/agent-source-of-truth/elixir
• cURL / REST: docs.firecrawl.dev/agent-source-of-truth/curl

See Also

• firecrawl-build
• firecrawl-build-scrape
• firecrawl-build-interact
• firecrawl-research-index
• firecrawl-developer-index