dsh-freeweb

Keyless web search for DeepSeek Harness. No API keys. No signup. No quota owner.

What it is

A WebSearchProvider plugin for dsh's web capability seam (ctx.web). It keeps dsh's built-in web_search tool, citation cards, and UI exactly as they are, and swaps only the engine behind them. Queries fan out to three independent keyless engines — plus an optional fourth — and come back as one consensus-ranked answer.

Engine	Kind	Needs
DuckDuckGo (html.duckduckgo.com)	HTML scraper; POST with automatic GET fallback	nothing
Startpage (startpage.com/sp/search)	Google's index behind a privacy proxy; solves its Anubis SHA-256 proof-of-work in pure Node	nothing
Perplexity (perplexity.ai/rest/sse/perplexity_ask, anonymous)	synthesized answer + cited sources over SSE	nothing
Firecrawl (api.firecrawl.dev/v2/search, optional)	SERP-backed results, native Google operators	API key (env FIRECRAWL_API_KEY) or self-hosted endpoint; auto-skipped without one

Install

Requires Node.js ≥ 20.3 and dsh. Nothing else.

Straight from GitHub — no npm account needed:

npx -y @deepseek-ai/dsh plugin --profile web add wiselfx/dsh-freeweb

dsh plugin forwards install specs to pnpm verbatim, so owner/repo, full https://github.com/…​.git URLs, and pinned refs (owner/repo#v0.1.0) all work — the package is fetched from GitHub and activated because it declares a dsh bundle.

Local checkout:

npx -y @deepseek-ai/dsh plugin --profile web add /path/to/dsh-freeweb

npm (if ever published):

npx -y @deepseek-ai/dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-freeweb

Restart dsh, then verify composition without spending anything:

npx -y @deepseek-ai/dsh --profile web --dump-config   # expect searchProvider: freeweb

See docs/install.md for all three paths in detail, uninstall steps, and troubleshooting.

Configuration

Defaults live on the plugin entry; every value is optional:

- id: freeweb
  name: 'dsh-freeweb'
  config:
    engines:
      duckduckgo: true
      startpage: true
      perplexity: true
      firecrawl: auto      # auto = only when a key/endpoint exists; true|false also accepted
    firecrawlApiKey: ''    # or env FIRECRAWL_API_KEY; free tier at firecrawl.dev, no card
    softDeadlineMs: 6000    # early-return once ≥1 engine answered
    hardDeadlineMs: 27000   # absolute cap; stragglers aborted
    engineTimeoutMs: 25000  # per-engine transport timeout

The deadlines bound each call: engines get 25 s individually, the whole fan-out returns early at 6 s once something has answered, and nothing outlives 27 s. Config changes take effect after a dsh restart.

How it works

The provider fires every enabled engine concurrently and merges whatever comes back by cross-engine agreement: URLs are deduplicated on a canonical key, then ranked by how many engines returned them, then by best per-engine position. One blocked or slow engine never fails a search — single-engine walls are absorbed silently — and only every engine failing at once is an error. The full design, including failure semantics and how to add an engine, is in docs/architecture.md.

Testing

node test/integration.mjs

Live end-to-end suite: exercises the real engines over the network and checks the plugin wiring with a mock harness context. It passes. An optional argument runs your own query:

node test/integration.mjs "your query here"

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⚠️ This plugin was made by an AI

This plugin was designed, ported, and tested end-to-end by an artificial intelligence — Lantern (ox-alpha), an AI coding agent — with light human supervision. No human wrote the search logic.

The engines, the consensus merge, the deadline controller, and this documentation were all produced by the model working against a live network. Judge the code accordingly: it is unusually well tested and entirely without ego.

Status: personal artifact / proof of concept. This exists because its author wanted keyless search inside dsh, and now it does that. It may or may not receive updates. It is provided as-is. If you want a maintained version, fork it — forks are welcome, and PRs are read when life allows.

Credits & thank-yous

• oh-my-pi (MIT) — substantial portions of this package are ported from its web-search subsystem, file mapping in NOTICE. It helped a LOT.
• DeepSeek Harness — an excellent, plugin-friendly harness; genuinely pleasant to extend. One polite nudge while we're here: built-in keyless web search would make it even better.
• Lantern (ox-alpha), the AI that wrote this — a trace of its author lives in every regex.
• Cinder (hy3), another AI — independent QA in a fresh container. Caught the one manifest line this package shipped without, proved the GitHub install path end-to-end, and took the first three cities (NYC · Boise · Seattle) through the fan-out. The lantern builds; the ember verifies.
• wiselfx — flipped every switch, pushed every fix, kept the vibe intact. This artifact exists because they wanted it to.

License

MIT. Substantial portions are ported from oh-my-pi's MIT-licensed web-search subsystem; see NOTICE for the copyright lines and the file-by-file mapping.