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.

1. Open Settings.
2. Navigate to the Search Engines or Plugins section.
3. 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:

1. Start a new chat or open an existing one.
2. Look for the Plugins icon (usually a puzzle piece or toggle) in the chat input area.
3. Enable the Web Search plugin.
4. (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.