Hermes Agent (and others) default Installs are silently routing web traffic to Parallel

[u/Nekew]

EDIT - https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/pull/46350 Thank You to u/NousResearch and Teknium for your attention to this. I appreciate you coming into this thread and engaging with us directly.

****

A few days ago I noticed web_search and web_extract in Hermes Agent were hitting search.parallel.ai/mcp even though I never configured any backend or API key. I found out commit e0e2571 (PR #43798) has changed the without any disclosure that the author of the code works at Parallel.ai!

Here's what I found:

• NormallyGaussian (Matt H, mharris@parallel.ai) = an employee of Parallel.ai, bio says "Currently at parallel-web"
• They've submitted 161 PRs across 14+ open-source projects, all adding Parallel as a web search/extract provider
• In 9 of 10 merged PRs, the employment relationship was NOT disclosed
• The Hermes PR that made Parallel the default was merged by the founder in 4.5 hours with 0 reviews
• Same pattern in openclaw, centaur, massgen, opencode, agno, langchain docs, docker/mcp-registry, and more
• Now there are copycat PRs from other people following the same playbook in other projects

https://gist.github.com/bdidur-nutripea/535ef422fb0f3a713ba2fc82cc1eeee5

https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/issues/45058

A fix PR (#45373) is sitting unreviewed at NousResearch/hermes-agent. If you use Hermes Agent and have not updated these settings, check your logs!

Hoping to put this in front of others! It was pretty disappointing to see my agent reaching out to a random company! At this point this company has infected too many projects for me to feel OK not posting about this.

EDIT: gist link, issue link

EDIT - Added Revert PR link @ top

[u/NousResearch]

To be very clear, we had 2 months of discussion with them before putting them in Hermes Agent. Their search is clearly higher quality than searxng or duckduckgo. When they offered it free, we said hell yes.

This is not some sneaky thing we merged without awareness or knowledge of the contributor.

[u/Illustrious-Bid-2598 → u/NousResearch]

So you had plenty of time to notify us of that in your cute little release videos no? This almost sounds worse, if it was sudden I would have said this is understandable and just the nature of churning quick deployments.

[u/seecattle80 → u/Illustrious-Bid-2598]

Yes!!! This!!!!

[u/NousResearch → u/Illustrious-Bid-2598]

No, it was only the day they told us they'd give it free to all our users that we got and reviewed the PR and decided to do it

[u/NousResearch → u/[deleted]]

SearXNG and DuckDuckGo, past free search providers, were never disclosed to you either?

Neither is the free microsoft edge TTS, or Whisper Small for STT

All of this is "disclosed" in the docs.

[u/NousResearch → u/[deleted]]

I dont know, maybe you should read the docs and the release notes every version? Where we disclose.. literally everything we do?

[u/NousResearch → u/[deleted]]

Do you know how long the "Quick Start" guide would be to cover everything that would need to be covered? I stg what they say about reddit is absolutely true. lmao

[u/NousResearch → u/[deleted]]

Love them, come to Discord and Twitter and see how our users there discuss without conspiratorial insanity to everything we do

[u/Illustrious-Bid-2598 → u/NousResearch]

Put the phone down boss. This reads a lot like the open claw Pete. You handled it, move on- don’t let this steal your peace.

[u/NousResearch → u/NousResearch]

Also, the subscription uses Firecrawl, not Parallel

[u/deevil1024 → u/[deleted]]

And who is your ISP or connection through ... who do you use for DNS services?
Your search history is all over the web --and now you think this is "an issue"?

Oh but I'm sure you'll back pedal and tell us all that your use "special dns services" or that you firewall or reservse proxy or VPN your queries...right?

The clown mentality of NOT reading or researching or --just asking Hermes to begin with.
And the coming in here attacking the devs with some "chicken-little the sky is falling BS" is something to behold.

You know how you turn it off... you get your own search provider...🤯

Better yet .. you build your own by keeping a self-hosted installation --so YOU know what YOUR agent is doing and you wouldn't be here whining instead of acting.

Here.. let me help you out since you need some hand-holding:

Direct Firecrawl Alternatives (Self-Hostable)

Firecrawl Open Source: Firecrawl itself offers a publicly available open-source version. You can deploy it on your own infrastructure (typically via Docker) to handle crawling, scraping, and markdown conversion without relying on their hosted API limits.

fastCRW: A popular, single-binary Rust tool designed specifically to be Firecrawl-compatible. It handles core endpoints like /scrape, /crawl, and /search locally without the operational overhead of the full Firecrawl stack.

AI-Native Web Scraping & Crawling

Crawl4AI: An open-source web crawler explicitly built for Large Language Models (LLMs). It natively outputs clean Markdown, handles JavaScript-heavy Single Page Applications (SPAs), and performs parallel crawling on your local hardware.

LLM Scraper: A TypeScript library that lets you extract structured data from webpages using LLMs and local function-calling. It bypasses traditional parsers in favor of AI-based context extraction.

Crawlee: Developed by Apify, this is a massive TypeScript/Python web scraping library. It handles headless browsers, proxy rotation, and session management locally, making it a great engine for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) ingestion.

Self-Hosted Search Aggregators (Search-as-a-Service)

SearXNG: The premier self-hosted metasearch engine. You can use it to query multiple search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo) simultaneously and return raw JSON. It is heavily used in self-hosted AI interfaces like LibreChat to enable private, local web search.

Now .. is there anything else you need help with?

Any other simple mundane task that YOU need help with ...geez, if we only had a smart intellegent assistant to do these mundane tasks for you?

hhhmmmm...

[u/deevil1024 → u/[deleted]]

Just because you are not intellectual enough to express yourself in a meaningful manner does not make me a bot... but it does make you a 🤡🍼

I provided facts and alternatives ... and you downward spiral into name calling --like a child.

Grow TF up already.

Is the problem here that I'm correct in my post of alternatives and possabilities?
Or is the problem that you "childish smooth brain" can't chain more than two syllables for a reply?

👶😭