Web Search

A local MCP server that gives Claude or IBM Bob or other Agents web search and page-fetching capabilities. Built to work around:

• the network restrictions that Claude organisation accounts operate under.
• no built-in "web search" capabilities.

Why this exists

Claude.ai organisation accounts restrict outbound network access to a fixed domain allowlist. General web search and browsing are blocked and regular members cannot change that. Personal accounts have built-in web search and don't have this problem.

This server runs locally on your machine — where the internet is unrestricted — and proxies web requests back to Claude via the MCP protocol. If you've ever hit host_not_allowed with no way to fix it, this is for you.

IBM Bob does not have built-in web-browsing or internet capability due.

What it does

Two tools, nothing more:

Tool	Description
search_list	Search the web via DuckDuckGo and return up to 10 ranked results
access_site	Fetch any URL, follow redirects, and return its content as plain text

Tech stack

Component	Technology	Version
Language	Python	≥ 3.12
MCP framework	FastMCP (mcp package)	≥ 1.28.1
Search backend	DuckDuckGo (ddgs package)	≥ 9.14.4
Package manager	uv	any recent

Architecture

graph TD
    AIAgent[AI Agent] -->|MCP stdio / HTTP| Server[mcp-web-search<br/>FastMCP server]
    Server -->|HTTPS| DDG[DuckDuckGo API]
    Server -->|HTTPS| Web[Any public URL]

AI agent calls one of the two tools over MCP. The server makes the outbound request from the local machine (bypassing Claude and/or IBM Bob's network restrictions) and returns structured JSON.

Key design decisions

No authentication on the server Decision: The server accepts all requests without any auth token or API key. Why: It only binds to 127.0.0.1 by default and is intended as a personal local tool — adding auth would be friction with no real security benefit in that context. Do not change because: adding auth here would also require changes to every Claude Desktop config that uses this server.

Raw urllib instead of httpx / requests Decision: access_site uses the stdlib urllib.request only. Why: Avoids an extra dependency for a single HTTP call. ddgs already handles the search transport. Do not change because: it keeps the dependency surface minimal; only revisit if redirect handling or TLS behaviour becomes a problem.

Setup & contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.