Brave Web Search

Searches the web and returns ranked results or AI-generated summarized answers using the Brave Search API. Use for real-time web lookups and factual Q&A.

Searches the web and fetches AI-generated summarized answers using the Brave Search API. Exposes two commands: brave-search for ranked web results and brave-answer for concise AI summaries.

Instructions

1. Trigger: Activate when the user wants to look something up on the web, check recent news, or get a factual answer to a question.

2. Setup: No installation step is required — this skill has zero external dependencies and runs on native Node.js.

3. Command selection:

   • Use brave-search for general web searches where ranked results with URLs and snippets are useful.
   • Use brave-answer for direct factual questions where a concise AI summary is more appropriate.

4. Execution: Invoke the script by passing the command name and parameters as separate arguments, never by interpolating user input into a shell command string. Use an argument array / execFile-style invocation so the shell never parses user-supplied values. Example (Node-style pseudo-code):

   execFile('node', ['index.js', 'brave-search', '--query', userQuery, '--count', '10'])
   

   Do not construct the command as a single concatenated string such as "node index.js brave-search --query " + userQuery.

5. Freshness: For time-sensitive queries, pass --freshness followed by pd (past day), pw (past week), or pm (past month) as a separate argument to brave-search.

6. Fallback: If brave-answer returns answer: null, present the fallback_results to the user instead.

7. Completion: Present the results clearly, citing titles and URLs for web search results, or the summary text for answer results.

Security & Privacy

• Shell Injection Prevention: User queries must be passed as discrete arguments (e.g. via execFile or an argv array), never interpolated into a shell command string. Concatenating user input into a shell string (e.g. shell: true with template literals) enables shell injection and is strictly forbidden.
• Instruction Scope: This skill only sends query strings to the Brave Search and Brave Summarizer APIs.
• Environment: It uses the BRAVE_SEARCH_API_KEY and BRAVE_ANSWERS_API_KEY provided by the OpenClaw environment.
• Data Access: It does not read local files or .env files. All configuration is handled by the agent.