nc://deepseek-search

DeepSeek Search & Fetch: web search and page fetch on DeepSeek's own APIs, with your key. A Nodecode rewrite of JasonSwindle/hermes-deepseek-search-fetch by JasonSwindle.

The model gets two tools — deepseek_search, which finds pages and answers ranked hits with the vendor's date, site, quality score and authority, and deepseek_fetch, which reads one page as Markdown — plus the same two as verbs called through eval, (deepseek-search:search "query") and (deepseek-search:fetch "https://…"). It is the plugin's own pair of endpoints: POST https://api.deepseek.com/v1/tools/search and /v1/tools/fetch, billed by DeepSeek to your account.

Get it

Tell the agent "add the deepseek-search cell", or run nodecode add nc://deepseek-search.

Set it up

DeepSeek bills Search & Fetch per successful request — $0.75 per 1,000 calls, with failed calls and empty results free — so the cell needs a key from platform.deepseek.com/api_keys. Nodecode keeps it out of the config file if you prefer:

{
  "deepseek-search": {
    "api_key_env": "DEEPSEEK_API_KEY"   // or "api_key": "…", or just the variable itself
  }
}

A start with no key anywhere is refused, and the refusal names the three ways to give it one. Everything else has a default: count (5, at most 50) how many hits a search asks for, max_chars (8000) how much of a fetched page comes back, timeout_seconds (30) one request's ceiling, need_content (off) whether every hit carries its page text, and localization (empty) an IPv4 or IPv6 address to localise results to. See config.example.jsonc.

Use it

Ask for something that needs the web; the model calls the tools. From eval:

(deepseek-search:search "kestrel hovering behaviour" :count 3)
(deepseek-search:fetch "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kestrel")

A search answers a numbered list — title, url, description, then whatever signals the vendor sent (date, site, rerank ~2.25, authority 3). A fetch answers the url, its title as a heading, and the page as Markdown, cut at max_chars with a line saying where it was cut. Both are also tools, so the model can call them in a turn without eval.

A refusal is a line, not a crash: ERROR: deepseek-search: … names what went wrong — a missing key, HTTP 401, a 402 with the top-up sentence, a transport failure — and the model repairs from it.

What it sends, and where

Two endpoints on api.deepseek.com, a bearer key, and nothing else: no telemetry, no update check, no second host. The key is never echoed into an answer or a log; vendor error text is cut to 300 characters before the model sees it.

base_url exists so a test can point the cell at a local server; it is a setting, so anyone who can edit the section can redirect the key — the original plugin made the same choice with its environment variable and guarded it to the vendor origin or loopback.

What the rewrite kept

• The 128-character query ceiling, clamped client-side at a word boundary, so a long question is never sent as-is.
• The search fields the vendor documents: query, count, need_content, localization — and all five hit signals, with an unknown authority (-1) left out.
• The fetch endpoint's backslash escaping, reversed: \# becomes #, \[a link\](…) becomes [a link](…), while a page's own \d and C:\path survive, because only a backslash before ASCII punctuation is removed.
• Two retries on 408, 429 and any 5xx, waiting 1 s then 2 s plus a little jitter, with a Retry-After honoured instead when it asks for ten seconds or less, and a 402 answered once with the top-up sentence.
• One page's failure is one line in the answer; the other pages are still read. An empty result set is success with no hits.

Not carried

• The harness-shaped parts: a provider base class, the settings surface, and the batch deadline that kept a multi-URL extract inside that harness's web-extract timeout. Here each request has its own ceiling, and the tool takes one URL (or a short list) at a time.
• The fallback to the host's keyless search ring when DeepSeek fails: that is the host's behaviour, and Nodecode's own nodecode-websearch cell is the separate choice for it.
• A hit's site_icon url, which a text answer cannot use.

Test

From the cells repository's root:

NODECODE_SRC=<a nodecode source tree> .github/test-cell.sh tools/nodecode-deepseek-search

Every DeepSeek call is a stubbed nlk:http and every retry wait is stubbed, so the suite is offline, keyless and unbilled.

MIT licensed. The original's licence and this folder's credit are in LICENSE and NOTICE.