The agent can search the web and fetch specific URLs. There are two engines under the hood, and a single toggle decides which one is used.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://www.rumus.ai/docs/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
The two modes
| Mode | Network | Where it goes | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Local DuckDuckGo Lite | Direct from your machine | DuckDuckGo’s lite search page | Free |
| Cloud Rumus search API | Via Rumus | A paid search backend | Tiny per-query, included with built-in usage |
Toggle the mode
Settings → AI → General → Cloud Web Search — toggle it. When off: the agent uses local DuckDuckGo Lite. No login required. Free. When on: the agent uses the Rumus cloud search API. Requires sign-in. Comes with built-in subscription usage tracking.Local DuckDuckGo Lite
The default. Rumus fetches the DuckDuckGo Lite HTML search page directly from your machine and parses the result rows out of the page. Pros and cons:- ✅ Free. No account needed.
- ✅ No third-party tracking via Rumus.
- ❌ Search quality is what DuckDuckGo Lite gives you — fine for many queries, weaker for niche or technical queries.
- ❌ Subject to whatever rate limits DuckDuckGo applies — heavy use can occasionally trip them.
- ❌ Page format changes upstream can break parsing until Rumus updates.
Cloud Rumus search API
When enabled, search queries go through Rumus’s cloud search API, backed by a commercial search backend. Results include:- Title, URL, snippet (same as local).
- Extra snippets — additional context paragraphs from the page.
- Age metadata — how recent the result is.
Web fetch (separate)
Search and fetch are two different tools:- Search — give it a query, get back a list of result URLs.
- Fetch — give it a URL, get back the page contents (text-extracted).
https://example.com/...” skips search entirely.
The fetch tool uses a headless Chromium engine that downloads on first use (around 150–200 MB) — Rumus prompts you to install it the first time the agent wants to render a real web page. Skip it (and lose the ability to fetch JS-rendered pages) by leaving the engine uninstalled.
When to enable cloud search
If you’re a daily AI user and you’ve noticed the agent missing recent or niche information when searching, flip cloud search on. The improvement is most visible on:- Recent events / changelogs / version-specific docs.
- Highly technical queries where local search throws up SEO content.
- Searches that benefit from richer snippets (the model can pull better context without an extra fetch).
Privacy
- Local mode — your search query is sent to DuckDuckGo. Standard DDG privacy applies. Rumus doesn’t proxy or log it.
- Cloud mode — your search query is sent to Rumus’s search API. Rumus logs the query for billing / abuse monitoring, but not the resulting page contents.
Tips
- Be specific in your prompt. “Find recent issues with HTTP/3 in Caddy” beats “tell me about Caddy” — both for the agent and for the search engine, regardless of which mode you use.
- For one-off niche searches, point at the URL directly. If you already know the page (a man page, a vendor doc), fetch it instead of searching.
- For repeated specialized lookups, prefer an MCP tool. Internal docs, ticket systems, and similar are better served by an MCP integration than by general web search.
Next steps
Agentic execution
Where search and fetch fit in the agent’s tool loop.
MCP integration
For internal data, custom tools beat general web search.