Firecrawl’s search API allows you to perform web searches and optionally scrape the search results in one operation.

  • Choose specific output formats (markdown, HTML, links, screenshots)
  • Search the web with customizable parameters (location, etc.)
  • Optionally retrieve content from search results in various formats
  • Control the number of results and set timeouts

For details, see the Search Endpoint API Reference.

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Performing a Search with Firecrawl

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/search endpoint

Used to perform web searches and optionally retrieve content from the results.

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Installation

pip install firecrawl-py

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Basic Usage

from firecrawl import FirecrawlApp

# Initialize the client with your API key
app = FirecrawlApp(api_key="fc-YOUR_API_KEY")

# Perform a basic search
search_result = app.search("firecrawl web scraping", limit=5)

# Print the search results
for result in search_result.data:
    print(f"Title: {result['title']}")
    print(f"URL: {result['url']}")
    print(f"Description: {result['description']}")

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Response

SDKs will return the data object directly. cURL will return the complete payload.

{
  "success": true,
  "data": [
    {
      "title": "Firecrawl - The Ultimate Web Scraping API",
      "description": "Firecrawl is a powerful web scraping API that turns any website into clean, structured data for AI and analysis.",
      "url": "https://firecrawl.dev/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Web Scraping with Firecrawl - A Complete Guide",
      "description": "Learn how to use Firecrawl to extract data from websites effortlessly.",
      "url": "https://firecrawl.dev/guides/web-scraping/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Firecrawl Documentation - Getting Started",
      "description": "Official documentation for the Firecrawl web scraping API.",
      "url": "https://docs.firecrawl.dev/"
    }
    // ... more results
  ]
}

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Search with Content Scraping

Search and retrieve content from the search results in one operation.

from firecrawl import FirecrawlApp, ScrapeOptions

# Initialize the client with your API key
app = FirecrawlApp(api_key="fc-YOUR_API_KEY")

# Search and scrape content
search_result = app.search(
    "firecrawl web scraping",
    limit=3,
    scrape_options=ScrapeOptions(formats=["markdown", "links"])
)

# Process the results
for result in search_result.data:
    print(f"Title: {result['title']}")
    print(f"URL: {result['url']}")
    print(f"Content: {result['markdown'][:150]}...")  # first 150 chars
    print(f"Links: {', '.join(result['links'][:3])}...")  # first 3 links

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Response with Scraped Content

{
  "success": true,
  "data": [
    {
      "title": "Firecrawl - The Ultimate Web Scraping API",
      "description": "Firecrawl is a powerful web scraping API that turns any website into clean, structured data for AI and analysis.",
      "url": "https://firecrawl.dev/",
      "markdown": "# Firecrawl\n\nThe Ultimate Web Scraping API\n\n## Turn any website into clean, structured data\n\nFirecrawl makes it easy to extract data from websites for AI applications, market research, content aggregation, and more...",
      "links": [
        "https://firecrawl.dev/pricing",
        "https://firecrawl.dev/docs",
        "https://firecrawl.dev/guides",
        // ... more links
      ],
      "metadata": {
        "title": "Firecrawl - The Ultimate Web Scraping API",
        "description": "Firecrawl is a powerful web scraping API that turns any website into clean, structured data for AI and analysis.",
        "sourceURL": "https://firecrawl.dev/",
        "statusCode": 200
      }
    },
    // ... more results
  ]
}

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Advanced Search Options

Firecrawl’s search API supports various parameters to customize your search:

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Location Customization

from firecrawl import FirecrawlApp

# Initialize the client with your API key
app = FirecrawlApp(api_key="fc-YOUR_API_KEY")

# Search with location settings (Germany)
search_result = app.search(
    "web scraping tools",
    limit=5,
    location="Germany"
)

# Process the results
for result in search_result.data:
    print(f"Title: {result['title']}")
    print(f"URL: {result['url']}")

Use the tbs parameter to filter results by time:

from firecrawl import FirecrawlApp

# Initialize the client with your API key
app = FirecrawlApp(api_key="fc-YOUR_API_KEY")

# Search for results from the past week
search_result = app.search(
    "latest web scraping techniques",
    limit=5,
    tbs="qdr:w"  # qdr:w = past week
)

# Process the results
for result in search_result.data:
    print(f"Title: {result['title']}")
    print(f"URL: {result['url']}")

Common tbs values:

  • qdr:h - Past hour
  • qdr:d - Past 24 hours
  • qdr:w - Past week
  • qdr:m - Past month
  • qdr:y - Past year

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Custom Timeout

Set a custom timeout for search operations:

from firecrawl import FirecrawlApp

# Initialize the client with your API key
app = FirecrawlApp(api_key="fc-YOUR_API_KEY")

# Set a 30-second timeout
search_result = app.search(
    "complex search query",
    limit=10,
    timeout=30000  # 30 seconds in milliseconds
)

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Scraping Options

When scraping search results, you can specify multiple output formats and advanced scraping options:

from firecrawl import FirecrawlApp, ScrapeOptions

# Initialize the client with your API key
app = FirecrawlApp(api_key="fc-YOUR_API_KEY")

# Get search results with multiple formats
search_result = app.search(
    "firecrawl features",
    limit=3,
    scrape_options=ScrapeOptions(formats=["markdown", "html", "links", "screenshot"])
)

Available formats:

  • markdown: Clean, formatted markdown content
  • html: Processed HTML content
  • rawHtml: Unmodified HTML content
  • links: List of links found on the page
  • screenshot: Screenshot of the page
  • screenshot@fullPage: Full-page screenshot
  • extract: Structured data extraction

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Cost Implications

When using the search endpoint with scraping enabled, be aware of these cost factors:

  • Standard scraping: 1 credit per search result
  • PDF parsing: 1 credit per PDF page (can significantly increase costs for multi-page PDFs)
  • Stealth proxy mode: +4 additional credits per search result

To control costs:

  • Set parsePDF: false if you don’t need PDF content
  • Use proxy: "basic" instead of "stealth" when possible
  • Limit the number of search results with the limit parameter

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Advanced Scraping Options

For more details about the scraping options, refer to the Scrape Feature documentation. Everything except for the FIRE-1 Agent and Change-Tracking features are supported by this Search endpoint.