Engines

seia supports 9 backends, all reached through their official HTTP API (or, where no API exists, lightweight HTML scraping). There is no headless browser — seia is a pure HTTP client, so every engine works from both the CLI and the library through the same Engine enum.

Most engines expose a free tier; the ones that need a key read it from a documented environment variable, so no key ever appears in code or CLI args.

Two execution modes

Mode	How it works	Used by
API	Calls a search provider's HTTP API, parses JSON.	Tavily, SearXNG, Wikipedia, Bing, Brave, 智谱, 博查, 秘塔
Scrape	Fetches the lightweight HTML results page, extracts hits.	DuckDuckGo

Engine matrix

International

Engine	Enum	Mode	Auth	Free tier	Status
DuckDuckGo	`Duckduckgo`	Scrape	none	unlimited	✅
Wikipedia	`Wikipedia`	API	none	unlimited	✅
SearXNG	`Searxng`	API	`SEARXNG_URL`	self-hosted	✅
Tavily	`Tavily`	API	`TAVILY_API_KEY`	1 000/month	✅
Bing	`Bing`	API	`BING_SEARCH_API_KEY`	1 000/month	✅
Brave	`Brave`	API	`BRAVE_SEARCH_API_KEY`	2 000/month	✅

Domestic (China)

Engine	Enum	Mode	Auth	Status
智谱 (Zhipu / BigModel)	`Zhipu`	API	`ZHIPU_API_KEY`	✅
博查 (Bocha)	`Bocha`	API	`BOCHA_API_KEY`	✅
秘塔 (Metaso)	`Metaso`	API	`METASO_API_KEY`	✅

智谱's Web Search API can route through one of several backing engines — 智谱基础版 (search_std, default), 智谱高阶版 (search_pro), 搜狗 (search_pro_sogou), or 夸克 (search_pro_quark). Select one with the ZHIPU_SEARCH_ENGINE env var.

博查 returns both a short snippet and a longer LLM-generated summary per page; seia surfaces whichever is longer as the result's snippet.

秘塔's search scope defaults to webpage; override it with the METASO_SCOPE env var (e.g. academic). Its response envelope is parsed defensively, so it tolerates either {data:{results:[…]}} or {data:[…]}.

Selecting an engine

CLI:

seia search "query" --engine wikipedia
seia search "查询" --engine zhipu      # needs ZHIPU_API_KEY

Library:

use seia::{SearchClient, Engine};

let client = SearchClient::new();
client.search("query", Engine::Wikipedia).await?;
client.search("查询", Engine::Zhipu).await?;   // needs ZHIPU_API_KEY

Inspecting engine metadata

Engine carries its own metadata:

use seia::Engine;

for engine in [Engine::Duckduckgo, Engine::Tavily, Engine::Bing, Engine::Zhipu, Engine::Metaso] {
    println!("{:?}", engine);                 // duckduckgo / tavily / bing / zhipu
    println!("  needs key? {}", engine.needs_key());
    println!("  key env:    {:?}", engine.api_key_env());
}