plat 509

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PLAT-509 — Free search MCPs in the MCP catalog (after search_web_llm was removed)

Coordination	Value
State	fixed on main; needs a restart (catalog is read at startup)
Date	2026-10-05
Owner	integrations
Related	PLAT-508 (search_web_llm removed)

Source

With search_web_llm gone (PLAT-508), the free hosted search MCP services are available only as catalog connectors people add themselves.

State of the shared catalog (agent_go/configs/mcp_servers_clean.json, 90 servers before this change)

• Exa (https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp) and ParallelSearch (https://search.parallel.ai/mcp) were already there, keyless. The frontend already mapped their card text and the search category.
• Firecrawl was missing ("Tavily and Firecrawl later" in catalog.ts).
• Both server deployments (deploy/aws-ec2/server/mcp-servers.override.json, deploy/rootless-linux/products/confida/mcp-servers.override.json) remove ParallelSearch on purpose ("ParallelSearch": null); left as is.

Done

• Added Firecrawl (https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp) to the shared catalog, with a card description and the search category. The card text of Exa, Parallel and Firecrawl now says "free tier, rate limited".
• Checked: an MCP initialize request to all three URLs answers HTTP 200 without a key (handshake only; tool calls on the free tiers can still be rate limited, which is why the old tool kept failing).

Left

• The gateway's embedded snapshot (mcp-gateway/internal/catalog/catalog.json, 62 providers; has Exa, not ParallelSearch or Firecrawl) was not changed.
• Server deployments get Firecrawl too (only ParallelSearch is removed there); add "Firecrawl": null to the two overrides if free keyless search should not be offered on servers.
• No place for a user's own Exa / Parallel / Firecrawl API key in these catalog entries; they are keyless only.