Proposal: Desearch web search tool for AgentScope

[Chkhikvadze]

Problem

AgentScope agents have no built-in search or web crawl tool in src/agentscope/tool/_builtin. Users who want web, X/social or page content currently have to write their own tool function.

Proposed solution

Desearch (https://desearch.ai) is a search API. Verified capabilities used here:

• AI search: one query returns summarized results with source links
• Web search: ranked web results (title, link, snippet)
• X/social search: posts matching a query
• Web crawl: fetch the content of a given URL

Access is either the REST API (https://api.desearch.ai, Authorization: Bearer <DESEARCH_API_KEY>) or the hosted MCP server at https://mcp.desearch.ai/mcp with the same Bearer header. Docs: https://desearch.ai/docs

Minimal scope:

• One tool function (e.g. desearch_web_search(query, max_results) returning a ToolResponse), placed where maintainers prefer: a new built-in, or an example under examples/.
• Reads DESEARCH_API_KEY; no new required dependency.
• Unit test with mocked HTTP and a short doc snippet.

Alternatives

• Docs/example only, connecting AgentScope's MCP client to the hosted server https://mcp.desearch.ai/mcp with a Bearer header. No library code.

Offer

We (Desearch team) are happy to implement this, add tests and docs, and keep it maintained. We will wait for maintainer feedback before opening a PR. Happy to go with whichever option the core team prefers.