brave-search

What This Skill Does

The brave-search skill provides a powerful, headless interface for the Brave Search engine, enabling the OpenClaw agent to retrieve real-time information, documentation, and web content without the overhead of a full browser environment. By integrating directly with the Brave Search API, this skill allows the agent to perform granular searches, control the number of results, and extract clean, reader-friendly markdown from specific URLs. It is designed to act as the primary information retrieval layer for the agent, making it indispensable for tasks requiring up-to-date facts or complex research.

Installation

To begin using the skill, ensure you have the OpenClaw environment ready. First, navigate to the skill's local directory within your project structure to initialize dependencies:

cd ~/Projects/agent-scripts/skills/brave-search npm ci

You must also obtain a valid BRAVE_API_KEY from the Brave Search API developer console. Set this key in your environment variables to authorize your requests. For standard installations across the ecosystem, you can add it via your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/alexeyvorobiev/alexey-brave-search.

Use Cases

• Technical Research: Quickly fetching official documentation or API references for programming libraries.
• Fact-Checking: Verifying current events or technical specifications against web-indexed data.
• Content Extraction: Converting complex web articles or blogs into simplified markdown format for easier processing by the AI agent.
• Automated Summarization: Searching for topics and parsing the textual content of results to generate concise summaries without manually opening links.

Example Prompts

1. "Search for the latest installation guide for React 19 and provide the key steps in markdown format."
2. "Find the top 3 articles discussing the impact of quantum computing on modern cryptography and extract the content."
3. "What is the current status of the OpenClaw repository? Search for documentation and give me the direct link."

Tips & Limitations

• Optimization: Use the -n flag sparingly. While retrieving more results is useful for broad research, it increases API consumption and processing time.
• Performance: Always prioritize the --content flag when you need deep reading capabilities, but keep in mind that extracting full page content takes longer than a basic snippet search.
• Dependencies: This skill relies strictly on an active internet connection and a valid API key. If you encounter network errors, verify your BRAVE_API_KEY connectivity before debugging your script execution.