easy-search

What This Skill Does

The easy-search skill for OpenClaw is a lightweight, dependency-free utility designed to perform web searches directly from your environment without needing expensive API keys or complex authentication tokens. By leveraging direct HTTP requests and efficient regex-based parsing, it interfaces with major search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Baidu. This skill is built to provide rapid, text-based data retrieval while maintaining system portability. It supports environment-wide proxy configurations via the ALL_PROXY variable, making it suitable for secure or restricted network environments. Whether you need to scrape simple search results for quick research or integrate search functionality into a larger automation pipeline, easy-search provides a reliable, open-source solution that works "out of the box."

Installation

To integrate this skill into your environment, utilize the standard OpenClaw installation command via the terminal:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/hkall/easy-search

Ensure that you are running a compatible version of Python (3.6 or higher). Because this skill uses standard library components or minimal bundled packages, installation is nearly instantaneous and does not require building large dependencies.

Use Cases

• Research Automation: Rapidly aggregate links and snippets for topics without manual browser interaction.
• Content Aggregation: Fetching search results for specific queries across different engines for comparative analysis.
• Language-Specific Searching: Using engines like Baidu to retrieve results in languages or regions where Google might be restricted or less effective.
• Offline/Restricted Environment Querying: Accessing public web information through a configured proxy tunnel for auditing or intelligence gathering.

Example Prompts

1. "Hey OpenClaw, use easy-search to find the latest documentation on React hooks and give me the results in Markdown format."
2. "Search for 'machine learning trends 2024' using the Bing engine and provide a JSON summary of the top 10 results."
3. "I need a quick check on 'best privacy-focused browsers'; please perform a DuckDuckGo search and list the top results."

Tips & Limitations

• Engine Diversity: If you experience rate limiting or blocks on Google, immediately rotate your query to DuckDuckGo or Bing to bypass anti-bot measures.
• Proxy Configuration: If you are behind a corporate firewall, ensure the ALL_PROXY environment variable is explicitly exported in your shell profile.
• Best-Effort Parsing: Since this tool uses regex rather than a full DOM-rendering browser, complex dynamic pages may occasionally return incomplete snippets. Keep queries specific and concise for the best results.
• Anti-Bot Awareness: Frequent, high-volume requests from a single IP address can trigger CAPTCHAs. Implement manual delays between heavy batch processing cycles.