Web Search
AI-powered web search
Availability depends on your school's enabled tools, provider setup, and account permissions. These settings are managed in the web workspace. A class policy may restrict a feature described here.
Overview#
Nexus can access the internet for questions that require up to date information or for niche information that the LLM may not be certain about.
Users can toggle the Web Search Action on the fly to override the LLM's decision. If Internal Search was used during the research process, Nexus will combine web sources with internal documents in both the answer generation and for displaying in the UI.
Requirements#
To provide Web Search functionality, Nexus requires both the ability to get search results and to be able to parse websites for more complete context. This is broken down into 1) the search provider and 2) the web scraper.
Search Providers#
Nexus provides multiple search providers (pricing subject to change, please double check):
| Name | Provider | Price | Benefit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exa | Exa.ai | $5/1000 queries | AI-optimized with better semantic capabilities. |
| Serper | Serper.dev | Free tier + $0.30/1000 queries | Fast and cost-effective. |
| Brave | Brave Search API | Usage-based | Independent search index with strong web coverage and simple API-based setup. |
| Google PSE | Free tier + $5/1000 queries | Official Google search results, high-trust option for security-conscious teams. | |
| SearXNG | SearXNG | Self-hosted / infrastructure cost only | Self-hostable metasearch option that can aggregate multiple engines and keep searches private. |
Web Scrapers#
As the Search Providers only give short snippets and metadata, a scraper is used to fetch the full site contents for more complete/reliable answers.
| Name | Requires Config | Benefits |
|---|---|---|
| Nexus Web Crawler | No | Built-in crawler that works for most pages, keeps queries in your deployment, and is free to use. |
| Firecrawl | Yes, API key + base URL | More performant with better edge case handling. |
| Exa | Yes, API key | Fetches and summarizes page content through Exa for teams already using Exa as their search provider. |