Firecrawl Skills

Included skill

Firecrawl Build Search

Optional base URL for self-hosted Firecrawl deployments.

Source: /skills/firecrawl-build-search/SKILL.md

Firecrawl Build Search

Use this when the application starts with a query, not a URL.

Use This When

  • the user asks a question and the product must discover sources first
  • the feature needs current web results
  • you want to turn a search query into a shortlist of pages for later scraping

Default Recommendations

  • Use /search first when URL discovery is part of the product behavior.
  • Keep search and extraction conceptually separate unless scraping search results is clearly required.
  • Prefer selective follow-up extraction over broad hydration when cost or latency matters.

Common Product Patterns

  • answer generation with cited sources
  • company, competitor, or topic discovery
  • research workflows that produce a shortlist of web pages before deeper extraction
  • query-to-URL pipelines for later /scrape or /interact

Note that "research workflow" here means discovering web pages. If the product is searching published papers, that is a different surface — see the escalation rules below.

Escalation Rules

  • If you already have the URL, use firecrawl-build-scrape.
  • If the result page then requires clicks or form interaction, escalate to firecrawl-build-interact.
  • If the feature searches published research papers — biomedical, clinical, and life-science literature (PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv) or arXiv preprints — /search is the wrong surface. Use the research paper index instead: firecrawl-research-index. Passing categories: ["research"] to /search does not query that index; it filters an ordinary web search to research-affiliated websites (the list includes PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, and publisher sites) and returns page results from them — no abstract search, related-paper expansion, or full-text passages.
  • If the feature answers developer questions from issues, pull requests, READMEs, or documentation pages, use the developer index instead: firecrawl-developer-index. The same caveat applies to categories: ["developer"].

Implementation Notes

  • Treat /search as discovery, ranking, and source selection.
  • Be explicit about whether the product needs snippets, URLs, or full result content.
  • Keep the query contract stable so downstream scraping logic stays predictable.

Docs (Source of Truth)

Read the source-of-truth page for your project language before writing integration code:

See Also