Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server for the RAG Web Browser Actor 🌐

Implementation of an MCP server for the RAG Web Browser Actor. This Actor serves as a web browser for large language models (LLMs) and RAG pipelines, similar to a web search in ChatGPT.

🔄 What is model context protocol?

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables AI applications (and AI agents), such as Claude Desktop, to connect to external tools and data sources. MCP is an open protocol that enables secure, controlled interactions between AI applications, AI Agents, and local or remote resources.

🎯 What does this MCP server do?

The RAG Web Browser Actor allows an AI assistant to:

• Perform web search, scrape the top N URLs from the results, and return their cleaned content as Markdown
• Fetch a single URL and return its content as Markdown

🧱 Components

Tools

• search: Query Google Search, scrape the top N URLs from the results, and returns their cleaned content as Markdown.
  • Arguments:
    • query (string, required): Search term or URL
    • max_results (number, optional): Maximum number of search results to scrape (default: 1)

Prompts

• search: Search phrase or a URL at Google and return crawled web pages as text or Markdown
  • Arguments:
    • query (string, required): Search term or URL
    • max_results (number, optional): Maximum number of search results to scrape (default: 1)

Resources

The server does not provide any resources and prompts.

🛠️ Configuration

Prerequisites

• MacOS or Windows
• The latest version of Claude Desktop must be installed (or another MCP client)
• Node.js (v18 or higher)
• Apify API Token (APIFY_API_TOKEN)

Install

Claude Desktop

Configure Claude Desktop to recognize the MCP server.

1. Open your Claude Desktop configuration and edit the following file:

   • On macOS: ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
   • On Windows: %APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

   "mcpServers": {
     "mcp-server-rag-web-browser": {
       "command": "npx",
       "args": [
         "/path/to/mcp-server-rag-web-browser/build/index.js",
       ]
       "env": {
          "APIFY-API-TOKEN": "your-apify-api-token"
       }
     }
   }
   

2. Restart Claude Desktop

   • Fully quit Claude Desktop (ensure it’s not just minimized or closed).
   • Restart Claude Desktop.
   • Look for the 🔌 icon to confirm that the Exa server is connected.

3. Examples

   You can ask Claude to perform web searches, such as:

   What is an MCP server and how can it be used?
   What is an LLM, and what are the recent news updates?
   Find and analyze recent research papers about LLMs.
   

👷🏼 Development

Local Development

If you're working on an unpublished server, you can access the local server via the following command:

"mcpServers": {
    "mcp-server-rag-web-browser": {
      "command": "/path/to/mcp-server-rag-web-browser/build/index.js",
    }
    "env": {
        "APIFY-API-TOKEN": "your-apify-api-token"
    }
}

Local client

To test the server locally, you can use example_client:

node build/example_client.js

The script will start the MCP server, fetch available tools, and then call the search tool with a query.

Debugging

Call the RAG Web Browser Actor to test it:

APIFY_API_TOKEN=your-apify-api-token node build/example_call_web_browser.js

Since MCP servers operate over standard input/output (stdio), debugging can be challenging. For the best debugging experience, use the MCP Inspector.

Build the mcp-server-rag-web-browser package:

npm run build

You can launch the MCP Inspector via npm with this command:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector node ~/apify/mcp-server-rag-web-browser/build/index.js APIFY_API_TOKEN=your-apify-api-token

Upon launching, the Inspector will display a URL that you can access in your browser to begin debugging.