servers-modelcontextprotocol/src/brave-search/README.md

Brave Search MCP Server

An MCP server implementation that integrates the Brave Search API, providing both web and local search capabilities.

Features

• Web Search: General queries, news, articles, with pagination and freshness controls
• Local Search: Find businesses, restaurants, and services with detailed information
• Flexible Filtering: Control result types, safety levels, and content freshness
• Smart Fallbacks: Local search automatically falls back to web when no results are found

Tools

• brave_web_search

  • Execute web searches with pagination and filtering
  • Inputs:
    • query (string): Search terms
    • count (number, optional): Results per page (max 20)
    • offset (number, optional): Pagination offset (max 9)

• brave_local_search

  • Search for local businesses and services
  • Inputs:
    • query (string): Local search terms
    • count (number, optional): Number of results (max 20)
  • Automatically falls back to web search if no local results found

Configuration

Getting an API Key

1. Sign up for a Brave Search API account
2. Choose a plan (Free tier available with 2,000 queries/month)
3. Generate your API key from the developer dashboard

Usage with Claude Desktop

Add this to your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "brave-search": {
    "command": "npx",
    "args": ["-y", "@modelcontextprotocol/server-brave-search"],
    "env": {
      "BRAVE_API_KEY": "YOUR_API_KEY_HERE"
    }
  }
}