openclaw-search-tool-0.1.5 is not a library.

OpenClaw Research Tool

Web search for OpenClaw agents, powered by OpenRouter. Ask questions in natural language, get accurate answers with cited sources. Defaults to GPT-5.2 which excels at documentation lookups and citation-heavy research.

Note: Even low-effort queries may take 1 minute or more to complete. High/xhigh reasoning can take 10+ minutes depending on complexity. This is normal — the model is searching the web, reading pages, and synthesizing an answer.

For OpenClaw agents: Run research-tool in a sub-agent so your main session stays responsive while the search runs:
sessions_spawn task:"research-tool 'your query here'"
⚠️ Never set a timeout on exec when running research-tool. Queries routinely take 1-10+ minutes. Use yieldMs to background it, then poll — but do NOT set timeout or the process will be killed mid-search.

research-tool "How do I set reasoning effort parameters on OpenRouter?"

Built on OpenRouter, which gives any model live web search via the :online suffix. The default model is openai/gpt-5.2:online, but you can use any model OpenRouter supports.

Install

cargo install --path .

Setup

Get an API key from OpenRouter and set it in your environment:

export OPENROUTER_API_KEY="sk-or-v1-..."

Or add it to a .env file in your working directory.

Usage

Search in natural language — write your query the way you'd ask a person:

# Simple question
research-tool "What are the x.com API rate limits?"

# Deep analysis
research-tool --effort xhigh "Compare tradeoffs between Opus 4.6 and gpt-5.3-codex for programming"

# Quick fact check
research-tool --effort low "What year was Rust 1.0 released?"

# Custom persona
research-tool -s "You are a senior infrastructure engineer" "Best practices for zero-downtime Kubernetes deployments"

# Use a different model
research-tool -m "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-20250514:online" "Summarize recent changes to the OpenAI API"

# Pipe from stdin
cat question.txt | research-tool --stdin

# Save output (response goes to stdout, metadata to stderr)
research-tool "Explain the React Server Components architecture" > output.md

Options

Flag	Short	Default	Description
`--model`	`-m`	`openai/gpt-5.2:online`	Model to use. Defaults to GPT-5.2 — great for cited answers and docs. Append `:online` to any model for web search.
`--effort`	`-e`	`low`	Reasoning effort: `low`, `medium`, `high`, `xhigh`
`--system`	`-s`	Research assistant	Custom system prompt / persona
`--max-tokens`		`12800`	Max response tokens
`--timeout`		none	Optional request timeout in seconds (no timeout by default)
`--stdin`			Read query from stdin

How it works

Your query is sent to OpenRouter's chat completions API
The :online model variant enables live web search — the model browses the web, reads pages, and synthesizes an answer
Response text goes to stdout (pipe-friendly), reasoning traces and token stats go to stderr
Connection status is printed so you know if the search is still running or failed

Tips

Write naturally. "What are the best practices for Rust error handling?" works better than keyword-style queries.
Provide context. The model starts from zero — the more detail you give, the better the answer. A 200-word question with background context will outperform a 5-word question.
Use effort levels. --effort low for quick lookups (~1-3 min), --effort xhigh for deep research (5-20+ min).
Any model works with :online. Try anthropic/claude-opus-4-6:online or google/gemini-2.5-pro:online for different perspectives.

Output

🔍 Researching with openai/gpt-5.2:online (effort: high)...
✅ Connected — waiting for response...

[response text to stdout]

📊 Tokens: 4470 prompt + 184 completion = 4654 total | ⏱ 5s

Cost

Roughly $0.01–0.05 per query depending on response length and reasoning effort. Token usage is printed after each query.

License

MIT

openclaw-search-tool 0.1.5