[Feature Request] Revisit Search Engine Settings UX & UI

[1827marketing]

Motivation

In the Settings for Windows Desktop app users are invited to add a Search Engine for agents to use.

The only choice is Google. This requires an API key and Search Tool ID. The link that is supposed to explain how to get them takes you to a page that explains that this approach is no longer available (https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview)

One suggested alternative is Google's Custom Search Engine tool. But this does not provide general web search. It requires you to scope searches to a specific site or page. It's intended to let people add Google Search to their own websites. (https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/tutorial/creatingcse)

So right now the interface asks you to set up search engine that is either no longer possible or that can't do the job. It makes new users feel that they can't add search to their agents.

Solution

Possible solutions might be:

• allow alternative search engines to be added in this part of the interface. The UI seems to have been designed with this in mind but only Google id offered.
• remove this option and encourage search MCP servers to be used instead. As an experienced user of LLMs but someone who is new to Eigent i must admit that the current interface design leaves me with a nagging doubt over whether this will work even though I believe in principle it should.

Additionally, we could consider:

• include an option to allow LLMs to use their own search tools. Increasingly, LLMs allow their own search tools to be invoked as part of an API request. Adding an option to prefer LLMs 'native' search either as a general setting or as a model-by-model setting might be helpful, although there would be a maintenance overhead for the Eigent team to keep up to date with different model capabilities.

Alternatives

No response

Additional context

No response

[1827marketing]

Since raising this feature request I have become aware of two related issues, #1385 and #1364 . I understand these are being worked on by @Wendong-Fan and @bytecii

Although I raised this issue as a feature request/enhancement I now consider it a bug. It is impossible for new users to configure Google Search because Google no longer offers it, and Browser Agent tells LLMs that it can't search when Google Search is not configured.

It looks like there is code to support additional search engines but it would not be a simple change. Apparently /backend/app/agent/toolkit/search_toolkit.py already has commented-out code for Brave, DuckDuckGo, Tavily and Bing. However, uncommenting these would not be enough to enable these search engines as alternatives. Changes would also be needed to the Browser Agent System Prompt (workflow and url policy) and Browser Agent Factory as well as to several frontend files (search connector settings, chat store search configuration, model switching warning, locale files) and potentially other files too, so it's quite a big undertaking.

A faster solution might be to allow Browser Agent to use MCP Servers. This would also require changes to the Browser Agent System prompt so that it understands that it can still search even when search_google is not configured.