Providers

Fourteen search backends. Jev, the filter, is the one key you must have; every search backend is optional.

Order

Providers are taken in this order, skipping any that are cooling down (see cooldowns):

1. A provider set in config, if any.
2. Your own metasearch: searxng, then degoog, when their URLs are set.
3. Providers you set a key for, in the order brave, exa, parallel, sonar, youcom, tavily, firecrawl, keenable, serpbase, serply. Brave is the author's pick: 5,000 free searches a month with a key, about 130 ms per query.
4. Only when no key is set at all: the hosted keyless endpoints parallel, exa, keenable, youcom, firecrawl, then ddg. Each throttles by IP after a few dozen queries a day; cooldowns rotate past the throttled ones.

Setting a key is a choice of engine: as soon as one exists, the free tiers leave the chain. With one key and sources: 3, one provider answers.

sources (default 3) providers are queried at once; a provider that errors or answers empty is replaced by the next. Lists are fused by reciprocal rank (k=60) and each result carries the engines that returned it. --sources 1 restores a plain fallback chain. Timeouts: 12s per attempt, 30s per search.

ketch is not in any default chain: it is a separate binary (brew install ketch) that rotates through the same keyless endpoints, so webctl calls them directly instead. Name it with -p ketch if you have it installed.

Backends

name	keyless	key / URL setting	env	notes
ketch	yes, if installed	none (ketch's own config)		not in the default chain; shells out to ketch search --json; ketch tries Parallel, Exa, Keenable, You.com, Firecrawl, then DuckDuckGo. Install: brew install ketch. Matched this tool's keyless chain on the eval suite at about half the latency
searxng	your instance	searxng	SEARXNG_URL	no quota; results depend on the engines it aggregates; see searxng
degoog	your instance	degoog	DEGOOG_URL	self-hosted Google-style metasearch, GET /api/search; no result count parameter
ddg	yes	none		DuckDuckGo HTML endpoint; unofficial, soft-blocks around 30/min per IP and sometimes refuses an address outright; cookie jar and 202 retry built in; short snippets
exa	yes, ~50/day per IP	exa	EXA_API_KEY	neural index; best on research and code queries; 2–8K-char excerpts. Keyed: $20 intro credit, $10/month free, $7 per 1,000, 10 QPS
parallel	yes, unpublished daily limit	parallel	PARALLEL_API_KEY	~0.7s, 2.8K-char excerpts, 10 results; keyed $1 per 1,000 (fast), 600/min
youcom	yes, ~70/day observed	youcom	YOUCOM_API_KEY	keyword results; keyed $5 per 1,000, $100 signup credit, 10/s
sonar	no	sonar	SONAR_API_KEY	Perplexity; runs an LLM, 90s timeout
brave	no	brave	BRAVE_API_KEY	recommended; up to 20 results per query, 50/s; free tier of 5,000 searches a month, then $5 per 1,000
tavily	no	tavily	TAVILY_API_KEY	agent-oriented, results carry extracted text; 1,000 credits a month free, a basic search is 1 credit, 1/s
firecrawl	hosted, IP-gated (often 429/403)	firecrawl	FIRECRAWL_API_KEY	v2 search; a key lifts the gate; a self-hosted URL is not supported here
keenable	yes, hourly cap	keenable	KEENABLE_API_KEY	index built for agents; ~1.8K-char page text per result; no result count parameter
serpbase	no	serpbase	SERPBASE_API_KEY	Google results; about 10 per request; business errors arrive as HTTP 200 with status 1001 (bad key), 1020 (credits), 1029 (rate limited) and are mapped to 401/402/429
serply	no	serply	SERPLY_API_KEY	Google results; at most 10 per request

Keyed use of a provider promotes it into the chain and lifts the keyless caps. Setting a key clears that provider's cooldown. keys validate makes one lightweight call per configured provider.

Adding a key

webctl keys set brave            # masked prompt
webctl keys set tavily --value tvly-...
webctl keys set searxng --value http://localhost:8899
webctl keys validate

Or the environment variable from the table, or setup for a guided pass over all of them.

What Jev sees

Each result reaches Jev as title, URL, and a snippet of up to 600 characters. When a provider returns page text (Exa, Parallel, Tavily, Keenable, ketch), the snippet starts at the first line that reads like prose, skipping navigation and bylines, and the full excerpt is kept as content: it stands in for a page that cannot be scraped and feeds the near-duplicate pass.