firecrawl search

Web search with optional content scraping. Returns search results as JSON, optionally with full page content.

When to use

• You don't have a specific URL yet
• You need to find pages, answer questions, or discover sources
• First step in the workflow escalation pattern: search → scrape → map → crawl → browser

Quick start

# Basic search
firecrawl search "your query" -o .firecrawl/result.json --json

# Search and scrape full page content from results
firecrawl search "your query" --scrape -o .firecrawl/scraped.json --json

# News from the past day
firecrawl search "your query" --sources news --tbs qdr:d -o .firecrawl/news.json --json

Options

Option	Description
--limit <n>	Max number of results
--sources <web,images,news>	Source types to search
--categories <github,research,pdf>	Filter by category
--tbs <qdr:h|d|w|m|y>	Time-based search filter
--location	Location for search results
--country <code>	Country code for search
--scrape	Also scrape full page content for each result
--scrape-formats	Formats when scraping (default: markdown)
-o, --output <path>	Output file path
--json	Output as JSON

Tips

• --scrape fetches full content — don't re-scrape URLs from search results. This saves credits and avoids redundant fetches.
• Always write results to .firecrawl/ with -o to avoid context window bloat.
• Use jq to extract URLs or titles: jq -r '.data.web[].url' .firecrawl/search.json
• Naming convention: .firecrawl/search-{query}.json or .firecrawl/search-{query}-scraped.json

See also

• firecrawl-scrape — scrape a specific URL
• firecrawl-map — discover URLs within a site
• firecrawl-crawl — bulk extract from a site