CLIO Web Search

Self-hosted web search and document understanding for AI agents.

We are building CLIO Agent, an SDK for creating scientific agents. Scientific work requires agents to discover technical information, retrieve many kinds of documents, process scientific papers, preserve scholarly metadata, and provide traceable sources for their conclusions.

Powerful libraries already address individual parts of this problem. SearXNG provides private, federated web search. Docling converts complex documents into structured representations. GROBID extracts scholarly metadata, references, and citation contexts from scientific papers. CLIO Web Search brings these capabilities together as a unified, self-hosted service designed for agent use.

CLIO Web Search is designed to work with the CLIO Kit Web MCP. The Web MCP gives agents a small interface built around search and fetch, while CLIO Web Search supplies the search, document conversion, DOI resolution, and scientific-paper processing behind those tools.

The Web MCP is part of CLIO Kit, a growing suite of scientific tools for agents. CLIO Web Search is distributed as an independent container and can be used by any compatible MCP client or agent system.

An agent can search the web, fetch a URL or DOI, and receive readable Markdown together with structured metadata, references, and in-text citation contexts.

Deploy directly

docker run --detach \
  --name clio-web-search \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  --publish 127.0.0.1:8088:8080 \
  --env CLIO_WEB_SEARCH_CONTACT_EMAIL=you@example.org \
  --volume clio-web-search-data:/var/lib/clio-web-search \
  ghcr.io/iowarp/clio-web-search:0.2.0

Docker pulls the published image automatically. A Git checkout is not required.

Or deploy with Compose

git clone https://github.com/iowarp/clio-web-search.git
cd clio-web-search
docker compose up -d

The defaults bind the service to 127.0.0.1:8088. Copy .env.example to .env to customize the deployment.

Connect the Web MCP

uvx --from clio-kit==2.9.0 \
  clio-kit mcp-server web \
  -- \
  --provider searxng \
  --address http://127.0.0.1:8088

Documentation

• Deployment
• Other container platforms
• Supported providers
• Security model
• Web MCP integration
• HTTP API

LLMs start here

The AI integration guide is the entry point for agents, coding assistants, and automated repository tools.

Development

uv sync --all-groups
uv run ruff check .
uv run ruff format --check .
uv run mypy
uv run pyright
uv run pytest

See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md for bundled components and licenses.