dsh-plugin-nuaa-search

dsh-plugin-nuaa-search

A zero-key web search provider for DeepSeek Harness's built-in web_search tool.

It registers a search provider (local-search) into the harness's ctx.web seam and answers queries by scraping real search engines — no official DeepSeek API key, no third-party search API key, no settings card.

中文说明见 README.zh.md。

Third-party community plugin, not affiliated with Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The nuaa in the name only helps students find it in the market; the plugin itself is network-agnostic.

Why

@deepseek-ai/dsh-web-search-deepseek sends every search to DeepSeek's official Anthropic-compatible endpoint, which needs an official API key. On a network or plan where that key is unavailable (for example a mainland-China campus gateway that only serves an OpenAI-compatible endpoint), web_search fails. This plugin replaces the provider instead of the endpoint: it implements the harness's own WebSearchProvider interface and fetches results itself.

Install

This package is not published to npm, so install it from the market or from a prebuilt release tarball — do not run dsh plugin add <package-name>, there is no registry entry behind that name.

From the market (easiest): open DSH → Settings → Plugins, search nuaa, and install. Listing: https://awesome-dsh-plugin.com/p/Oxygen640/dsh-plugin-nuaa-search/

From the prebuilt tarball:

dsh plugin --profile desktop add "https://github.com/Oxygen640/dsh-plugin-nuaa-search/releases/latest/download/dsh-plugin-nuaa-search.tgz"

From source:

dsh plugin --profile desktop add github:Oxygen640/dsh-plugin-nuaa-search

Restart the harness. The bundle patch points web.searchProvider at local-search and disables the official web-search-deepseek row (re-enable it in your profile's cordis.patch.yml if you want it back).

Backends

auto (default) = bing → so360 → searxng: the first backend that returns results wins, so a blocked or broken engine costs one timeout, not the whole search.

Query variants. Chinese long-tail queries break Bing's ranking: 南京航空航天大学图书馆 returns the official library pages, while 南京航空航天大学图书馆 预约座位 returns generic "南京市" pages instead. So each search also runs a second variant with trailing intent words (开放时间, 预约座位, 几点, 怎么…, 地址, …) stripped, and keeps whichever result set is more relevant to the entity phrase (longest-common-substring coverage; ties keep the original query so ordinary searches are unaffected). Measured on the failing case: 1/8 → 7/8 results from nuaa.edu.cn. Turn it off with stripIntent: false.

Backend	Status	Notes
bing	default, ~270ms	Bing China HTML: direct URLs, snippets, publish dates
so360	fallback	360 Search HTML: direct URLs
searxng	needs your instance	JSON API; the instance must enable format=json
baidu	often blocked	returns [] when the anti-bot page appears, never the challenge page

Config

Passed as the row config in cordis.patch.yml, or via environment variables as fallback.

Key	Default	Meaning
backend	auto	one backend or a chain ("bing,so360")
maxResults	8	cap; the caller's request.maxResults is also honored
deadlineMs	20000	internal deadline — returns what it has instead of hanging
backendTimeoutMs	8000	per-backend timeout
searxngUrl	—	instance base URL
userAgent	Chrome 126 UA	user agent used for scraping
log	true	one summary line per search in the host log
stripIntent	true	also search the entity phrase with trailing intent words stripped

Environment fallbacks: SEARCH_BACKEND, SEARCH_MAX_RESULTS, SEARCH_DEADLINE_MS, SEARXNG_URL, SEARCH_USER_AGENT.

Test

node --test test/provider.test.mjs

17 tests: backend-chain and config logic, the provider contract, query-variant relevance, live network searches, maxResults, deadline, cancellation (including an already-aborted signal), and query length normalization.

Releasing a new version

No registry is involved, so a release is: bump version in package.json, then build and attach the tarball under the same asset name so the latest/download/ URL keeps working.

npm pack --pack-destination release
ren release\dsh-plugin-nuaa-search-0.1.2.tgz dsh-plugin-nuaa-search.tgz

Then publish a GitHub release and attach dsh-plugin-nuaa-search.tgz.

Limitations

• HTML scraping: a Bing markup change needs a parser update (switch backend to so360 meanwhile).
• Bing ranks multi-token Chinese queries badly. It handles a clean entity name (南航图书馆, 南京航空航天大学图书馆) well, but degrades toward generic city pages when extra qualifiers pile up — 南京航空航天大学将军路校区图书馆 already returns "南京市". The query-variant fix covers the common "entity + intent word" shape, not this one.
• site: queries are not supported by the HTML endpoint and are passed through as plain text.
• Relevance is the search engine's; results are passed through, not rewritten or summarized.
• publishedAt is only set when a date is readable at the start of the snippet — never invented.
• One query per call, no pagination.
• Queries are truncated to 200 characters, which is where search engines stop honoring them anyway.

License

MIT