Ask HN: Is there a free MCP for web and documentation search?

1 points by terabytest 166 days ago | 2 comments

I'm struggling to find a way for Codex to perform thorough searches without having to pay for a plan or wasting tokens. What I've tried:

* Codex's built-in web search tool: can't browse JS-only sites. In my case, it's unable to browse developer.apple.com. * `microsoft/playwright-mcp`: It's able to perform searches and read pages, but very heavy hit on context. Burned through 10% of the context window for a single search. * Exa.ai, context7.com, Brave Search MCP: I'm strongly turned off by the pay-per-thousand model or caps on free plans. I understand they have to make money, it's just not what I want to spend money on. * https://github.com/arabold/docs-mcp-server: I didn't test this, but I was turned off by the fact you have to run the server in the background instead of allowing it to be booted by the Codex instance (via npx) like it can for other kinds of MCP servers.

Does anyone have a solution to this that hits on all marks: free, able to read websites including JS ones, thorough and high-quality?

AmariahKam 166 days ago |

Well im not too sure about MCPs

But i did build an app that could give you unlimited private browser searching if you have docker, its called Atlarix

https://www.atlarix.dev/

Feel free to try it out, if you have the backend docker setup, you can web search using the ai, for unlimited & free also its private so no data is stored at all

terabytest 166 days ago |

So far I've found https://github.com/jae-jae/fetcher-mcp which mostly does what I want, but it only started working well when I asked Codex to run it with `disableMedia: false`.