Web Researcher MCP

✨ Highlights — two new neural-search providers

This release adds Tavily and Exa as search providers and introduces two provider-independent synthesis tools that any future provider can back.

🔎 New providers

• Tavily (#54) — AI-agent search returning clean, LLM-ready extracted content (Bearer auth). SEARCH_PROVIDER=tavily.
• Exa (#53) — neural/semantic search (x-api-key). Powers web + news + academic search, and adds an optional paid /contents scrape-fallback tier that only runs after the four free scrape tiers fail (so the common path never incurs cost). SEARCH_PROVIDER=exa.

🧰 New tools (provider-independent)

• answer — ask a factual question, get one grounded answer with citations. The backing provider is pluggable; the result names the provider and reports per-call costUsd for metered providers.
• structured_search — search the web and extract structured JSON per result (supply a JSON schema), and/or focus by category (e.g. company, people, research paper) — company additionally returns structured entities.

Both tools are vendor-neutral by design (Exa is simply the first implementer) and register only when a capable provider is configured.

🔐 Security

• audit.MaskSecrets now also redacts prefix-less provider auth headers (x-api-key, x-subscription-token).
• Windows binaries are Authenticode-signed via Azure Trusted Signing (CN=Zohar Babin, RFC-3161 timestamped). macOS binaries remain unsigned pending Apple Developer enrollment.

📚 Docs

• Setting up API keys — includes the new Tavily and Exa sections.
• Tool reference — answer (Tool 15) and structured_search (Tool 16), plus the scrape_page Exa fallback tier (extractedBy provenance).
• Deployment & env vars · Architecture · Privacy (Exa disclosed as a third-party processor).

Upgrading: no breaking changes. Existing configs work unchanged; the new providers/tools activate only when you set TAVILY_API_KEY / EXA_API_KEY.

What's Changed

Full changelog: https://github.com/zoharbabin/web-researcher-mcp/compare/v1.16.2...v1.17.0

Changelog

New Features

• d55735594db25d0496f94f0d0fab9723563bff70: feat(search): add Exa provider — web/news/academic + grounded answer & structured search (#53) (@zoharbabin)
• 433630a7e07b86d2df1ab3763fc7ee6f4bcf198d: feat: Tavily search provider (#54) (#132) (@zoharbabin)

Bug Fixes

• 54f0321f531e44f94c44a2a99261f61a9614d71a: fix(audit): redact prefix-less provider auth headers in MaskSecrets (@zoharbabin)

Other

• d535203b1694cc4ef03ac9c6d264ca291a07584b: Merge pull request #134 from zoharbabin/feat/exa-provider (@zoharbabin)
• 3f5a66300c5a4a6e4fc45ae2453dca396c378214: chore(config): complete .mcp.json STDIO reference + drift guard; Tavily doc notes (#133) (@zoharbabin)
• 2215e95998f469cb34f0c9f702c2e2acebd6d01d: chore(release): v1.17.0 (#135) (@zoharbabin)

Docker Images

# GitHub Container Registry
docker pull ghcr.io/zoharbabin/web-researcher-mcp:1.17.0

# Docker Hub
docker pull docker.io/zoharbabin/web-researcher-mcp:1.17.0

Homebrew

brew install zoharbabin/tap/web-researcher-mcp

Verify Checksums

sha256sum -c checksums.txt