Maibaamcrawler
What it does
8 MCP tools that give your AI assistant the ability to research the web, read academic papers, extract YouTube videos, pull tweets, and ingest local files — all through the standard MCP protocol.
Tools
- web_search — 3-tier search cascade (Brave → DuckDuckGo → HTML scraper). Works with or without an API key.
- fetch_url — Fetch any URL and convert to clean markdown. SSRF-protected, cached, CAPTCHA-aware.
- research — Compound pipeline: search → parallel fetch → summarize → synthesize. Three depth levels.
- youtube_essence — Transcript, summary, key points, chapters, and quotes from any YouTube video.
- deep_ingest — Extract text from local files: PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, audio, video, images.
- academic_lookup — Resolve DOI, ArXiv ID, or PubMed ID. Fetch full text via institutional access.
- twitter_extract — Extract tweets and threads from X.com/Twitter.
- vault_status — Check loaded credentials and dependency status.
Key features
Works out of the box — zero configuration needed. Search and fetch work immediately. Add a Brave API key or Ollama for enhanced results.
Credential vault — Configure ~/.mcp-research/vault.yaml to access paywalled content through your university's EZproxy, API keys, or browser cookies. Secrets stay in environment variables, never in plain text.
Token-efficient — Output is capped by default (~4K tokens per fetch) so your AI doesn't waste its context window on raw HTML. All limits are adjustable.
Graceful degradation — Missing optional dependencies don't crash anything. No Ollama? You still get raw results. No yt-dlp? Twitter and YouTube tools tell you how to install it.
Safe — SSRF protection on every request. CAPTCHA detection (Cloudflare, hCaptcha, reCAPTCHA). No eval/exec. No filesystem writes. Cache directories locked to owner-only permissions.
Quick start
pip install mcp-research
mcp-research doctor # check your setup
Optional extras
pip install 'mcp-research[all]' # everything
pip install 'mcp-research[youtube]' # yt-dlp + whisper
pip install 'mcp-research[academic]' # PDF support
pip install 'mcp-research[twitter]' # yt-dlp for tweets
pip install 'mcp-research[ingest]' # PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, audio
Quick start
npx -y mcp-vfx-parsers
No installation needed — runs directly via npx. Zero external dependencies.
Server Config
{
"mcpServers": {
"research": {
"command": "uvx",
"args": [
"mcp-research"
],
"env": {
"BRAVE_API_KEY": "",
"OLLAMA_URL": ""
}
}
}
}