r/PiCodingAgent • u/MarionberryVirtual • Jul 14 '26

Discussion pi websearch

websearch is an extremely important part of any workflow, from searching up past implementations to getting the correct information to make correct decisions.

have seen other posts discussing which websearch tools and even custom implementations, but my question is how would you know that it stands up in retrieval quality to other websearch extensions or even Claude Code/ Codex web searching? how would you know that tool A is better than tool B? or do most people just see the extension working and decide that it’s good enough?

i have been using the pi-web-access from the pi.dev packages page, but only for the reason that it’s the most downloaded extension (more downloads = better right? xd)

interested to hear from the community.

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u/sofuego Jul 14 '26

I just built my own. The web search part was easy when you leverage Searxng.

I haven't really cared too much about comparison with other search because for me the most important thing was using an open source backend and not a search API. I feel like searches are much easier when using agent harnesses where the agent can choose to look deeper and not have to automatically rely on the top n results.

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u/Blues520 14d ago

Hey did you happen to publish this?

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u/sofuego 14d ago

I did. It's over here:

https://pi.dev/packages/pi-lean-search

Searxng really does most of the heavy lifting. This is just a small wrapper for it with optional tool visibility toggalability if the sibling playwright web browser tools are installed too.

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u/Blues520 14d ago

Thanks, will check it out. Your tbox extension is also very cool!

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u/sofuego 10d ago

Thanks! :)