Performing Web Searches
Web search allows your AI assistant to break free from its training data cutoff by fetching real-time information from the internet. In Witsy, this is handled through search plugins that ground LLM responses in actual search results.
Configuring Search Providers
Witsy follows a "Bring Your Own Key" model. To perform web searches, you first need to configure a search engine provider with your own API credentials.
- Open Settings.
- Navigate to the Search Engines or Plugins section.
- Choose your preferred provider and enter the required API Key:
- Perplexity: Best for high-quality, LLM-optimized search summaries.
- Tavily: Built specifically for AI agents to retrieve clean, LLM-ready content.
- Brave Search: A privacy-focused alternative with a robust API.
- Exa: Uses neural search to find high-quality links rather than just keywords.
- Local Google Search: Uses standard Google search results.
Enabling Web Search in a Chat
Once a provider is configured, you must enable the search capability for your specific chat session.
How to toggle search:
- Start a new chat or open an existing one.
- Look for the Plugins icon (usually a puzzle piece or toggle) in the chat input area.
- Enable the Web Search plugin.
- (Optional) If you have multiple search engines configured, select your preferred one from the dropdown menu.
Use Case Recipes
Recipe 1: Fact-Checking and Real-Time Data
If you need to know about events that happened this morning or current market prices, enable search before asking.
Prompt Example:
"What is the current stock price of NVIDIA, and what were the key takeaways from their earnings call today?"
What Witsy does: The LLM recognizes it lacks this data, triggers the search plugin, parses the top results, and provides a summarized answer with citations.
Recipe 2: Technical Troubleshooting for New Libraries
LLMs often struggle with library versions released after their training data cutoff.
Prompt Example:
"I'm getting a deprecation warning in the latest version of Next.js (v15). How do I migrate the
headers()function in Server Components?"
What Witsy does: It searches the official documentation and recent GitHub discussions to provide the most current syntax.
Recipe 3: Comparing Local Services
You can use Witsy to aggregate data from multiple web pages to make a decision.
Prompt Example:
"Search for the top-rated Italian restaurants in downtown Chicago. Create a table comparing their price range, signature dish, and whether they take reservations."
Tips for Better Search Results
- Be Specific: Instead of "Search for news," try "Search for recent news regarding the Artemis II mission launch date."
- Request Citations: You can ask Witsy to "Include URLs for the sources used in your answer" to verify the information manually.
- Model Choice: While web search works with most models, using a "Reasoning" model (like Claude 3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4o) usually results in better synthesis of the search results.
Troubleshooting
- Search fails to trigger: Ensure the plugin toggle is highlighted/active in the chat window.
- "API Key Invalid": Double-check that your provider key (e.g., Tavily or Perplexity) hasn't expired and has remaining credits/quota.
- Empty results: Try rephrasing your prompt to be more descriptive, as some search APIs require more context to return relevant snippets.