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Guides
How to give a local or cloud LLM live web search, cited evidence, and a context window that doesn't overflow. Each guide is data-backed, and the DIY path is always shown alongside Grounder.
- Best web search APIs for RAG & LLM grounding (2026): 8 compared Grounder, Tavily, Exa, Firecrawl, Brave, Serper, SerpApi and Parallel - with verified pricing, each tool's best-for job, a worked cost example, and the one Grounder-vs-Tavily head-to-head we actually measured.
- Give a local LLM live web search (Ollama & LM Studio) The full search → fetch → rank pipeline to give Ollama or LM Studio live web search, and how to fit the results into a small context window.
- Give DeepSeek live, up-to-date answers DeepSeek is frozen at its training cutoff and invents current facts. How to feed it live web context over MCP or an API pipeline, with measured proof it works.
- Why your local LLM returns nothing on a web page Feed a scraped page to a small-context model and it returns nothing - an empty response or a truncation error, not a worse answer. The failure, measured, and the token-capped fix.
- Tavily alternatives for AI agents & RAG Exa, Firecrawl, Linkup, Brave, SearXNG, Serper, and Grounder - the real Tavily alternatives compared, with a measured Grounder-vs-Tavily head-to-head (an 11-vs-12 near-tie).
- What is a grounding API? Web grounding for RAG & AI agents The concept companion to the comparison above: what web grounding is, how the search → fetch → rank pipeline works, grounding vs a static RAG index, the one number that matters for a small model, and where Grounder fits.
- MCP web search server: what it is and the options What a web-search MCP server does, whether there's an official one, the real options, and Grounder as one of them.
- Open-source & self-hosted search APIs for LLMs SearXNG and the self-hosted options, honestly - where open-source wins and where a hosted flat plan is worth it.
- Exa alternatives for AI & semantic search Alternatives to Exa's neural search, with an honest note on where Exa's semantic recall is the right pick.
- Firecrawl alternatives for scraping & RAG Alternatives to Firecrawl for turning pages into LLM-ready content, and who should stay on Firecrawl.