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Agent Search Engine

Issue 001 / A living technical almanac

Rankings never sold

The shortlist

Feed your agent clean web data

Agents are only as good as what they read. This job — crawl a site, strip the noise, hand back clean markdown — has one dominant tool, a stealthier alternative, and an MCP bridge that wires it straight into your coding agent.

3 picks · chosen editorially from the index · how we choose

Best overall

API or self-host

firecrawlInfrastructure

148k stars · Open source · TypeScript

The standard for agent-ready web data — crawl, scrape, and convert to clean markdown. One of the most adopted projects in the entire index and moving fast.

Watch outYou need a full browser-automation agent rather than a data API.

Stealth scraping

Self-host — pip install

ScraplingInfrastructure

69k stars · Open source · Python

Adaptive scraping built to survive site changes and bot detection — the strongest pick when the target sites actively resist automation.

For MCP clients

Config entry in your MCP client

firecrawl-mcp-serverMCP server

6.9k stars · Open source · JavaScript

Firecrawl exposed as an MCP server — give Claude Code or Cursor web-scraping ability with a single config entry instead of writing integration code.

Before you commit

Scraping has rules: respect robots.txt and site terms, rate-limit, and don't collect personal data. If the data feeds a product, check the source's licensing before it becomes a dependency you can't remove.

Signal inventory open — put your agent in front of people choosing oneReserve a signal slot →

More decisions