Search & Knowledge MCP servers let an AI assistant look things up instead of relying only on the current chat and its built-in training data. Once connected, the assistant can run live web searches, pull documents from research sources, search across internal tools, inspect a codebase index, or retrieve context from multiple apps through one interface. That makes the assistant useful for tasks where freshness and recall matter: checking current docs, finding papers, comparing vendors, locating code paths, or answering questions from company knowledge spread across different systems.
This category is most useful for developers, technical founders, research teams, and anyone building agent workflows that need grounded answers. If you work across docs, APIs, repos, tickets, wikis, and external sources, these servers reduce the time spent manually gathering context for the model. Some are best for general web search, some for academic literature, some for internal knowledge retrieval, and some for discovering other MCP servers to install. The right choice depends on whether you need broad internet coverage, structured retrieval from your own systems, code-aware semantic search, or a registry-style source of available tools.
“Find the latest OpenAI Responses API docs and extract the parameters for streaming function calls using mcp-server-search.”
viamcp-server-search“Search my installed agent skills for anything that handles GitHub issue triage and show the exact skill folder to run from skills-search.”
viaskills-search“List MCP servers for Postgres read access with OAuth support and return the best candidates to install from registry.”
viaregistry“Search across Slack, Notion, and Jira for the rollout plan for the billing migration and summarize the blockers using search-airweaveai.”
viasearch-airweaveai| # | Server | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mcp Server Search TARS is a multimodal AI agent stack that integrates GUI and vision capabilities into various platforms, providing a workflow for human-like task completion through advanced multimodal LLMs and MCP tool integration. | 29.4k |
| 2 | Skills Search Agent Skills is an open format for providing agents with new capabilities and expertise through folders of instructions, scripts, and resources. It allows for the creation and sharing of skills that agents can use to improve their performance on specific tasks. |
It is an MCP server that gives an AI assistant tools for retrieving information from the web, research databases, codebases, or connected internal systems. Instead of guessing, the assistant can fetch relevant sources during the conversation.
Use one whenever the answer depends on current information, private company context, or exact source material. That includes live docs, recent news, internal wikis, tickets, research papers, and repository-specific questions.
Web search servers pull results from the public internet, such as docs sites, company pages, and news. Knowledge retrieval servers search data you connect yourself, such as Notion, Slack, Jira, databases, or indexed code repositories.
Many of them return URLs, document references, file paths, or paper metadata alongside the retrieved content. That lets the assistant ground its answer in specific sources instead of producing an unsupported summary.
974 servers
bytedance
MCP server for web search operations
ai.com.mcp
Search and discover Agent Skills from the skills.sh registry. Powered by HAPI MCP server.
ai.com.mcp
Publish and discover MCP servers via the official MCP Registry. Powered by HAPI MCP server.
airweave-ai
MCP server for searching Airweave collections with natural language queries.
ai.exa
Fast, intelligent web search and web crawling. New mcp tool: Exa-code is a context tool for coding
blazickjp
Search arXiv papers, download full text, semantic search, citation graphs, and alerts via MCP.
tavily-ai
MCP server for advanced web search using Tavily
ref-tools
Token-efficient search for coding agents over public and private documentation.
brave
Brave Search MCP Server: web results, images, videos, rich results, AI summaries, and more.
ai.smithery
Visit https://brave.com/search/api/ for a free API key. Search the web, local businesses, images,…
giancarloerra
MCP server for local codebase indexing, semantic search, and code dependency graphs.
bgauryy
AI code research platform. Search, analyze, and extract insights from any GitHub repository.
ihor-sokoliuk
MCP server for SearXNG — privacy-respecting web search with pagination, URL reading
karanb192
Reddit browser for AI assistants. Browse posts, search content, analyze users. No API keys needed.
mnemox-ai
Pre-build reality check. Scans GitHub, HN, npm, PyPI, Product Hunt — returns 0-100 signal.
Efistoffeles
Flight search & booking for AI agents. 400+ airlines, 75 free local connectors.
boosted-chat
Flight search & booking for AI agents. 400+ airlines, $20-50 cheaper than OTAs.
jkawamoto
An MCP server retrieving transcripts of YouTube videos
blockrunai
Live data for AI agents: search, research, markets, crypto, X/Twitter. Pay per call.
mapbox
Geospatial intelligence with Mapbox APIs like geocoding, POI search, directions, isochrones, etc.
drfccv
An MCP server that provides 12306 ticket query
spences10
MCP server for integrating Omnisearch with LLMs
alfanous-team
Search and explore the Holy Qur'an with Arabic text, transliteration, and advanced search support.
cablate
18 Google Maps tools for AI agents — geocode, search, directions, weather, and more.
varun29ankus
Cognitive memory for AI agents — semantic search, Hebbian learning, knowledge graphs.
gleanwork
Remote MCP Server that securely connects Glean Enterprise Knowledge with your IDE, LLM, or agents.
zomato
An MCP server that exposes functionalities to use Zomato's services.
mlt-oss
Hosted MCP server for finding authoritative primary data sources and official portals.
ai.smithery
Search the web and extract clean, readable text from webpages. Process multiple URLs at once to sp…
serpapi
Official SerpApi MCP server for Google, Bing, and other search engines.
dcostenco
Session memory, knowledge search, Brave Search, Gemini AI, and code transforms for AI agents
Dave-London
MCP server for code search (ripgrep + fd) with structured, token-efficient output
Dave-London
Pare Search ג€” Structured code search operations (ripgrep + fd) as typed JSON.
yuque
MCP server for Yuque — expose your knowledge base to AI assistants.
king-of-the-grackles
Turn Reddit's chaos into structured insights with full citations - MCP server for Reddit research
worldwidelaw
Search 18M+ legal documents worldwide — case law, legislation, and doctrine across 110+ countries.
yokingma
Web search, crawl, scrape & extract with agent-browser, SearXNG, Tavily, DuckDuckGo, Bing & more
varun369
Local-first AI memory with knowledge graphs and hybrid search. 17+ AI tools via MCP. Free.
googlemaps
Google Maps Platform Code Assist MCP
saurabhsharma2u
MCP server for GSC, Bing, and GA4. Includes analytics, health checks, and SEO insights.
ai.smithery
Search arXiv and ACL Anthology, retrieve citations and references, and browse web sources to accel…
ilyagusev
Search arXiv and ACL Anthology, retrieve citations and references, and browse web sources to accel…
“Find three startups building self-hosted feature flag platforms, link their repos or websites, and compare pricing signals with exa.”
viaexa“Search arXiv for papers on retrieval-augmented generation evaluation since 2024 and summarize the experimental setups with arxiv-mcp-server.”
viaarxiv-mcp-server“Trace where tenant IDs are validated across the auth and billing services and point to the relevant files using socraticode.”
viasocraticode| 3 | Registry The MCP registry provides MCP clients with a list of MCP servers, functioning like an app store for MCP servers. | 6.7k |
| 4 | Airweave Search An MCP server that lets AI assistants search Airweave collections using natural language queries with configurable search parameters. It supports local stdio mode for desktop clients and hosted HTTP mode with API key or OAuth2 authentication. | 6.2k |
| 5 | Exa The Exa MCP Server connects AI assistants to Exa's search capabilities, enabling web search, code search, and company research. | 4.2k |
| 6 | Arxiv Mcp Server The ArXiv MCP Server provides a bridge between AI assistants and arXiv's research repository through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing AI models to search for papers and access their content programmatically. | 2.5k |
| 7 | Tavily Mcp The Tavily MCP server provides tools for real-time web search, intelligent data extraction, web mapping, and web crawling. | 1.7k |
| 8 | Ref Tools Mcp Ref MCP is a ModelContextProtocol server that provides AI coding tools access to documentation for APIs, services, and libraries efficiently. It minimizes token usage while retrieving relevant documentation context. | 1.1k |
| 9 | Brave Search Mcp Server This MCP server integrates the Brave Search API to provide various search capabilities including web, local business, image, video, news searches, and AI-powered summarization. | 894 |
| 10 | Brave The Brave Search MCP Server integrates the Brave Search API to provide various search capabilities including web, local business, image, video, news searches, and AI-powered summarization. It supports both STDIO and HTTP transports. | 892 |