I have been building tooling for AI agents in Python for about a year. The thing I keep needing, over and over, is "give the agent a search bar." Every time, the search bar costs me an account, an API key, a billing relationship, and a way to keep that key out of the repo. The first three are friction; the fourth is risk.
A few weeks ago I came across a public endpoint that does not have any of those: GET https://scouts-ai.com/api/search. No header for auth, no signup, no rate-limit-agreement landing page. I tried it from a shell, it returned a clean JSON response with title, url, content, engine, tookMs and a per-result publishedAt field. I have been using it as a research scratchpad ever since. This post is the field guide I wish I had on day one: what the response actually looks like, what the rate limits are (they are real, and they are not in the README), what the lang parameter actually does (it does not do what you think), and a 100-line MCP server you can install in 30 seconds that exposes the same thing as a single web_search tool to Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, Open WebUI, or any other MCP host.
The endpoint
GET https://scouts-ai.com/api/search
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