firecrawl-search

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
• 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

Options

| Option | Description | | ------------------------------------ | --------------------------------------------- | | --limit <n> | Max number of results | | --sources <web,images,news> | Source types to search | | --categories <github,research,pdf> | Filter by category | | --tbs <qdr:h\|d\|w\|m\|y> | Time-based search filter | | --location | Location for search results | | --country <code> | Country code for search | | --scrape | Also scrape full page content for each result | | --scrape-formats | Formats when scraping (default: markdown) | | -o, --output <path> | Output file path | | --json | Output as JSON |

Tips

• --scrape fetches full content — don't re-scrape URLs from search results. This saves credits and avoids redundant fetches.
• Always write results to .firecrawl/ with -o to avoid context window bloat.
• Use jq to extract URLs or titles: jq -r '.data.web[].url' .firecrawl/search.json
• Naming convention: .firecrawl/search-{query}.json or .firecrawl/search-{query}-scraped.json

See also

• [firecrawl-scrape](../firecrawl-scrape/SKILL.md) — scrape a specific URL
• [firecrawl-map](../firecrawl-map/SKILL.md) — discover URLs within a site
• [firecrawl-crawl](../firecrawl-crawl/SKILL.md) — bulk extract from a site