Argus Search
One endpoint, five search providers. Argus routes queries across SearXNG, Brave, Serper, Tavily, and Exa with automatic fallback, RRF result ranking, health tracking, and budget enforcement. Extract clean text from any URL. Remember prior queries for smarter follow-ups. Zero external database dependencies — SQLite only.
Connect via HTTP, CLI, MCP, or Python import.
Why Argus Without Argus, every agent that needs web search has to wire up individual provider APIs, handle keys and rate limits for each one, write its own fallback logic, deduplicate results from multiple sources, and build its own content extraction pipeline. Each project reimplements the same glue.
Argus replaces that with one endpoint. You add it to your agent once — the same way you'd add a database client or an LLM API wrapper — and it handles the rest:
No provider lock-in — swap Brave for Serper or add Exa without changing your agent code. Missing keys degrade gracefully; providers are skipped, not errors. Automatic fallback — if a provider is down, slow, or over budget, Argus routes to the next best one. Your agent doesn't need retry logic or circuit breakers. Better results than any single provider — Reciprocal Rank Fusion merges results from multiple sources. A URL that appears in both Brave and Serper ranks higher than one that only appears in one. Content extraction built in — found a useful link? Pass the URL to Argus and get clean article text back. Paywall domains get authenticated extraction first (Playwright via remote service), then trafilatura (local, free), then Jina Reader fallback. Cached in memory and SQLite so the same URL is never fetched twice. Multi-turn memory — Argus remembers prior queries in a session. Follow-up searches like "fastapi" after "python web frameworks" get context-enriched automatically. Budget-aware by default — each provider has a generous free tier (Brave: 2k/mo, Serper: 2.5k/mo, Tavily: 1k/mo, Exa: 1k/mo). Argus tracks usage per provider and automatically rotates away from one when its quota is hit. Combined, that's thousands of free searches per month — enough for most personal and development use. Think of it as the LiteLLM of web search — one API, multiple providers, unified interface.
What Argus Is (and Isn't) Core — search routing, result normalization, RRF ranking, provider health tracking, budget enforcement, deduplication.
Attached services — content extraction (auth extraction + trafilatura + Jina), multi-turn sessions, MCP server interface.
Not — a web crawler, a full document store, a general agent framework, an answer synthesis engine, or a multi-tenant SaaS. If you need those things, Argus integrates with systems that do them.
What It Does You pass Argus a search query. It routes to providers in cheap-first order, stops early when the first provider already produced enough useful results, and only falls through when failure, weak output, cooldown, or budget limits justify it. Results are ranked, deduplicated, and returned as one clean list.
Content extraction — Pass a URL and get clean article text back. For paywall domains, authenticated extraction runs first (Playwright on a remote service via Tailscale). Trafilatura (local, fast) tries next, Jina Reader falls back if needed. Results cached in memory and SQLite (168h TTL) — survives restarts.
Multi-turn sessions — Pass a session_id and Argus remembers what you've asked before. Follow-up queries get context-enriched automatically. Sessions persist to SQLite across restarts.
Token balance tracking — Track API credits (Jina, etc.) in SQLite. Balances auto-decrement on extraction. Set via CLI, view via API.
API key auth — Set ARGUS_API_KEY to require authentication on all endpoints (health exempt).
Server Config
{
"mcpServers": {
"argus": {
"command": "argus",
"args": [
"mcp",
"serve"
]
}
}
}