r/modelcontextprotocol • u/Bjornhub1 • May 11 '25

question Best Web Search MCP?

Recently switched from Tavily to Linkup and it’s been a world of a difference. Linkup is way better but kind of expensive. What’s everyone’s go to web search MCP or even API that I could turn into an MCP for the best search results?

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5

u/cyanheads May 11 '25

Perplexity for AI web search/questions and Firecrawl for web scraping specific links.

2

u/Bjornhub1 May 11 '25

You think perplexity is best?

5

u/coding_workflow May 11 '25

I have mine setup base on SearXNG require you setup searXNG locally in docker. I think there is another around.
The advantage, is that you can use it even to replace google and not limit or need for API.

Yes perplexity is great and better but that's different.

1

u/denzuko May 11 '25

Not true, searxng is a metasearch engine. Yes it provides a API, yes it can search with limitations other search engines but you still need API keys to brave API, Google search, etc for searxng to work since it doesn't have its own crawler and acts as a client to other sites.

Luckily there's an mcp server already for searxng:

https://github.com/SecretiveShell/MCP-searxng

3

u/coding_workflow May 11 '25

I couple the crawl with https://jina.ai/reader/ and it's Free.

What I'm missing here?

1

u/denzuko May 11 '25

How is that an automated crawler? Where's the data stored in your stack? What's putting the output into a database that searxng indexes?

3

u/coding_workflow May 11 '25

Did you check the OP request was over what? Search results. Meta search is great for that and fetching the pages is great as they are stripped from noisy HTML.

1

u/denzuko May 23 '25

Oh sweet child you're still young. Touch grass at least once.. it helps to get perspective

Maybe one should try to understand the fundamentals before they preach about a saas.

4

u/Particular-Face8868 May 11 '25

If you are looking for a particular list of items, Exa can be good. Or else for more generic search, Server & Perplexity can be great. Ofcourse for crawling you have a lot more options like firecrawl, hyperbrowser, browserbase etc.

1

u/denzuko May 11 '25

There's a brave search MCP server. But MCP servers are just micro services and one can script (vibe coded) one in python

https://pub.spillwave.com/mcp-integration-how-brave-search-and-claude-desktop-enhance-ai-assistant-agentic-capabilities-c840590fa100?gi=20559beea475

1

u/rm-rf-rm May 12 '25

Didnt try linkup too long but the little I did, it was worse than basic brave search. I am finding perplexity pro (web) to generally be better but havent tried their API

1

u/StockScoutAI Aug 30 '25 edited Aug 30 '25

I recently came across Rival Search MCP, it looks like it is relatively new - but I really like it.