Letting your assistant search the web

With the Web Search module installed, your assistant (and its researcher) can look things up on the live web — current events, prices, addresses, documentation, anything outside your instance's own data. Results come back as titled links with snippets, and the assistant cites what it found.

Web search is powered by a search provider. Victor currently supports Serper.dev (Google results); more providers will be added over time, and switching providers never changes how your agents use search.

For administrators: enable web search (once)

1. Get a Serper API key

1. Sign up at serper.dev — the free tier is enough to try it out.
2. Copy your API key from the dashboard. Treat it like a password.

2. Install the module and set the key

1. In Victor, open Modules and install Web Search.
2. Go to Instance Settings → Technical → System Parameters and open serper_api_key.
3. Paste the key as the value and mark it Secret (it is stored encrypted).

That's it. The web_search.provider parameter defaults to auto, which simply uses whichever provider key is set — you don't need to touch it.

Until a key is set, search is politely off

Nothing breaks without a key: if someone asks the assistant to look something up, it explains that web search isn't configured yet and what an administrator needs to do.

What users get

• Ask the assistant anything that needs the live web — it decides when to search, runs the query, and answers grounded in the results (with links).
• When Google has a direct answer (a fact box), it is returned first.
• Searches are read-only and never send your instance's data anywhere — only the search query itself goes to the provider.

For module developers

Custom agents can use the web_search tool like any other registered tool — attach it to your agent and it receives {title, url, snippet, position} rows. See Agents and Tools.