dsh-context-aware-search: Web Search That Actually Understands What You're Working On

A DeepSeek Harness (dsh) plugin that turns the web_search seam from a dumb keyword blast into a context-aware research assistant. It reads your current session, rewrites the raw query with what you're actually doing, reranksthe results by relevance to that context, tags every source with a credibility level, and can boil the top hits down into a one-click Markdown brief.

Same raw query, completely different — and far more useful — results when the plugin knows you're writing Rust instead of Go.

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Why this exists

Generic web-search plugins return the global most-popular page for a keyword. But when you search error handling while writing Rust, you don't want the Wikipedia overview — you want doc.rust-lang.org and thiserror patterns.

dsh-context-aware-search closes that gap with four capabilities that ordinary search plugins simply don't have:

• Context-aware query rewriting — the plugin reads your session's last N messages and expands the raw query with the technologies, languages, and libraries you're working with (e.g. await 报错 → Python asyncio await 常见错误 解决方案).
• Result reranking — results are scored by TF-IDF similarity to the (rewritten) query plus your session context, so the most relevant source lands on top instead of whichever SEO won today.
• One-click source summarization — the model-callable web_summarize tool fetches a URL (or the top-N search hits) and returns a structured Markdown brief: key points, key data, and source links.
• Source credibility tags — every result is labeled high / medium / low by domain rules (.edu / .gov / official docs = high, known media / registries = medium, personal blogs = low), so you can triage at a glance.

It works zero-config out of the box (DuckDuckGo HTML needs no API key) and fans out across up to three backends with automatic fallback.

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Comparison

Capability	dsh-context-aware-search	built-in web_search (dsh-web-tools)	dsh-web-search-deepseek	dsh-free-search¹
Context-aware query rewriting	✅	❌	❌	❌
Result reranking by context	✅ (TF-IDF)	❌	❌	❌
Source credibility tags	✅ high/med/low	❌	❌	❌
One-click web_summarize tool	✅	❌	❌	❌
Multiple backends + auto-fallback	✅ DDG / Bing / SearXNG	provider-dependent	single (DeepSeek)	single
Zero-config (no API key)	✅ (DuckDuckGo)	depends on provider	❌ needs DEEPSEEK_API_KEY	✅
Settings Card (live config)	✅	n/a	✅	varies
DSH version pinned	✅ 0.1.0-rc.6	same runtime	same runtime	varies

¹ dsh-free-search is a community no-key search plugin. The "❌" cells mark capabilities that are, by definition, not part of a generic keyword search; verify the upstream feature set before relying on this comparison.

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Install

⚠️ Do NOT install @latest. This plugin is built and type-checked against DeepSeek Harness 0.1.0-rc.6. The ctx.web seam contract can change between releases; an unpinned or mismatched version can break search and fetch for your whole harness. Always pin the plugin version:

dsh-context-aware-search@0.1.1

Method 1 — GitHub Release tarball (recommended, no build step)

1. Download dsh-context-aware-search-0.1.1.tgz from the Releases page.
2. Extract it into your dsh profile's plugin folder:

   mkdir -p ~/.dsh/profiles/node_modules/dsh-context-aware-search
   tar -xzf dsh-context-aware-search-0.1.1.tgz -C ~/.dsh/profiles/node_modules/ --strip-components=1
   

3. Add dsh-context-aware-search to your profile's dsh.profile.bundles array. Its bundled cordis.patch.yml re-pins the web seam to the context-aware providers as the active backends.
4. Restart dsh.

Method 2 — From the DeepSeek npm registry (needs registry access)

The @deepseek-ai/* runtime packages live on the DeepSeek registry, not public npmjs.com, so a plain npm install will not resolve the peer dependencies. With registry access:

npm install dsh-context-aware-search@0.1.1 --registry <your-deepseek-registry>

then enable it in your dsh bundle as in Method 1, step 3–4.

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Configuration

All settings are optional — the schema supplies the defaults below, and they can be changed live from the Settings Card (ctx → settings).

Key	Type	Default	Meaning
rerank	boolean	true	Rerank results by TF-IDF similarity to query + context.
credibility	boolean	true	Tag each result with a high/medium/low credibility badge.
rewriteEnabled	boolean	true	Rewrite the raw query using session context.
contextWindow	number	8	How many recent session messages to read for context.
backendOrder	string[]	['duckduckgo','bing','searxng']	Backend priority for fallback.
duckduckgoEnabled / bingEnabled / searxngEnabled	boolean	true	Per-backend on/off.
searxngInstance	string	''	Base URL of a SearXNG instance (empty = disabled).
bingApiKey	string	''	Optional Bing key (empty = keyless scrape fallback).
maxResults	number	10	Max results returned per search.
summarizeTopN	number	5	Links the web_summarize tool pulls when given a query.
userAgent	string	dsh-context-aware-search/0.1.1	UA sent on fetch.

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Usage

Just search as usual — the plugin does the rest.

Session:

User:  I'm writing a Rust CLI; my main() returns Result<(), Box<dyn Error>>.
User:  search error handling

What the plugin does:

1. Reads the last contextWindow messages → detects Rust, cargo, Result.
2. Rewrites error handling → Rust error handling Result Option unwrap ? best practices.
3. Runs the rewritten query across the backends (DuckDuckGo → Bing → SearXNG).
4. Reranks by context similarity and tags credibility.
5. Returns a banner + sources, e.g.:

🔎 Context-aware rewrite: Rust error handling Result Option unwrap ? best practices

| # | credibility | title | url |
|---|----|----|----|
| 1 | 🟢 high | Error Handling in Rust - The Rust Book | https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch09-00-error-handling.html |
| 2 | 🟢 high | Recoverable vs Unrecoverable Errors | https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch09-02-recoverable-errors-with-result.html |
| 3 | 🟡 medium | thiserror / anyhow patterns | https://crates.io/crates/thiserror |

One-click brief — ask the model to summarize:

User:  web_summarize query="Rust error handling best practices" topN=3

Returns a Markdown brief with key points, key data, and source links.

You can also summarize a specific page:

User:  web_summarize url="https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch09-00-error-handling.html"

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How it works

web_search(query)
   │
   ├─ context.ts      read last N session messages → plain-text context
   ├─ rewrite.ts      expand query with context terms (TF-IDF keyword extraction)
   ├─ backends/*      fan out to DuckDuckGo / Bing / SearXNG (priority + fallback)
   ├─ rerank.ts       TF-IDF score of each result vs (query + context) → reorder
   ├─ credibility.ts  domain rules → high / medium / low badge
   └─ search-provider.ts  assembles banner + pristine sources

web_summarize(url | query)
   ├─ fetch via ctx.web.fetch (context-aware-fetch provider)
   ├─ htmlextract.ts  pure-TS extractor → title / headings / paragraphs / lists
   └─ returns structured Markdown brief

No heavy NLP models, no external embedding service, no ctx.llm dependency — just TypeScript and the platform fetch. Lightweight by design.

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Known limitations

• No embedding model. Reranking uses TF-IDF over the query + context, not semantic vectors. It's fast and dependency-free but weaker on paraphrase / intent mismatch than an embedding model would be.
• Context text extraction is heuristic. It only reads text content blocks from recent messages; images, tool outputs, and non-text blocks are ignored.
• Search-result scraping is brittle. DuckDuckGo / Bing HTML parsing can break if those sites change their markup; SearXNG JSON is more stable when you point searxngInstance at a reliable instance.
• Summaries are extractive, not abstractive. web_summarize pulls and structures the page's own text; it does not generate a free-form prose summary (no LLM call by design).
• Credibility is rule-based. It keys off domain suffixes / fragments; a high-value personal blog can be under-rated and a slick low-quality site over-rated. Treat badges as triage hints, not verdicts.

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License

MIT © dsh-context-aware-search contributors.

Topics: dsh-plugin · deepseek-harness