brave-search

What This Skill Does

The brave-search skill provides OpenClaw agents with headless web search capabilities powered by the Brave Search API. Unlike browser-automation tools that rely on launching a full graphical instance, this skill performs direct API queries to retrieve search results and extract readable content. It is designed to be lightweight, fast, and resource-efficient, making it ideal for tasks that require quick information retrieval without the overhead of rendering a full web page. It supports fetching search result metadata such as titles, links, and snippets, and features a robust content extraction mode that returns page bodies as structured Markdown.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your environment, use the OpenClaw management CLI:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/amabillis/brave-search-old

Post-installation, ensure you navigate to the skill directory (~/Projects/agent-scripts/skills/brave-search) and execute npm ci to install dependencies. You must provide a valid BRAVE_API_KEY in your environment variables for the search requests to be authenticated.

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for scenarios where data extraction must happen silently and rapidly. Key use cases include:

• Aggregating technical documentation from multiple developer sources.
• Checking real-time facts or news without an interactive browser session.
• Automating research tasks where URLs need to be crawled and converted into plain-text Markdown for further analysis.
• Serving as a primary information retrieval layer for agent workflows that require up-to-date internet access.

Example Prompts

1. "Use brave-search to find the official documentation for the latest release of React and extract the main features into a markdown summary."
2. "Search for the current stock price of major tech companies using brave-search and list them in a table."
3. "Fetch the content from https://example.com/api-reference and tell me what the authentication requirements are."

Tips & Limitations

• Performance: Because this tool does not render JavaScript-heavy content in a full browser, some highly dynamic websites might not return full content through the extraction tool.
• Rate Limits: Be mindful of your Brave Search API quota to avoid service disruption.
• Security: Since this skill accesses external domains, ensure your environment's network policies allow outbound API calls to Brave Search endpoints. Keep your API key secured in your environment configuration rather than hardcoded in scripts.