Remove behavioral guidance from search responses

[quackerd]

Search responses currently append behavioral guidance through searchFollowupGuidance after receiving search results.

This is unnecessary and can be misleading in MCP clients that compose tools from multiple servers. For example, when Degoog's scrape tool is disabled via DEGOOG_MCP_DISABLE_SCRAPE, the MCP server appends No scrape tool is available on this MCP server. Use returned snippets, titles, URLs, related searches, and source metadata as the available evidence. to search results. This may cause models to prematurely stop trying to load pages for details when web loading is exposed by another standalone MCP server.

I think the search tool should return search results / data only instead of injecting guidance prompts and leave behavioral guidance to the model itself and system prompts. The fix can be as simple as removing/patching searchFollowupGuidance to return empty strings.

[fccview]

Hey!
This has all been rebuilt and is going through a testing phase!

All of it is working very differently now, would you be willing to try the new version instead? It'll be released soon enough but we're doing some testing first.

This is the branch

https://github.com/degoog-org/mcp/tree/rebuild

Example config

https://github.com/degoog-org/mcp/blob/rebuild/mcp.example.yml

You can change the docker flag from latest to rebuild pull and restart for it to work, but you will need to set it up differently, I've documented everything in readme and DEEP_SERCH.md (the new MCP does true deep search)

Lemme know if you have any issue/get stuck and feel free to join discord for more direct communications ♥️

[quackerd]

Hello, thanks for the hard work and response!

I switched to the rebuild image and was playing around with search and scrape (filed a separate bug report here #9). From what I can tell, at least scrape still returns model instructions as shown below (the "Cite source IDs" trunk).

I still think tools should just return pure content and exclude any instructions for models.

[fccview]

Hey, are you talking about the Answer using evidence first. Cite [S0], [S1]... stuff? if so, that's mostly for dumb models as if I just go for something like Sources are labelled [S0]-[S3] it'll 100% confuse them, this has been built with the idea of working with any type of models and I kinda doubt big models would actually be confused by any of it anyway?

Do you have any idea/suggestions on how to change this whilst keep making sure it works on dirty cheap models too? (this was battle tested by a few people on a gemma4:e2b model successfully, and I have used it on gpt5.5, sonnet5, opus5 and a few bigger qwen local models varying from 7b to 35b.

p.s. I am addressing #9 as everything these is very valid and must be fixed.

[quackerd]

Yes. In my open webui configuration, I tested deepseek-flash using the current main branch and it appended something like "scraper doesn't exist, use snippets to answer" when I disable the loader tool via the env var.

In deepseek's thinking trace, it clearly considered the returned "no scraper" instruction but since I also offered a web loader tool, it eventually got thru and invoked the tool. I'm just saying that those instructions might materially affect the behavior/reasoning of models and should be configurable.

I think you can expose an env var -- DEGOOG_MCP_APPEND_INSTRUCTIONS or something similar as a global toggle. Or in the rebuild MCP version -- you can even add fine grained, per endpoint instruction settings to the config file to allow configuring appended instruction. If unspecified, default to the default prompt. Otherwise replace the appended instruction so people can specify empty to disable it or customize to their liking.

[fccview]

I think you can expose an env var -- DEGOOG_MCP_APPEND_INSTRUCTIONS or something similar as a global toggle. Or in the rebuild MCP version -- you can even add fine grained, per endpoint instruction settings to the config file to allow configuring appended instruction. If unspecified, default to the default prompt. Otherwise replace the appended instruction so people can specify empty to disable it or customise to their liking.

How about I only add the line if the user is in compact mode? Which is likely gonna only be used for small models anyway?

Small caveat I should still leave a legend in the describe tooling at the very least, something as simple as Sources are labelled S1-S2 should do.

I'd like this to be as easy to customise/setup as possible, and I think env vars on top of default config sets is gonna be a huge overhead

[quackerd]

I think the fundamental thing is making the appended behavioral instructions optional and configurable.

I do think your "making the config file the only source of truth" makes sense and makes the architecture cleaner. alternatively you could introduce a global section or reuse the existing server section in the config file for those variables instead of relying necessarily on env vars. I think it's reasonable to take the easiest approach as long as the requirement is met -- and obviously you know the project much better than I do and I was simply suggesting off the top of my head.

Regarding the S1-S3 I think those are fine. Those are for information only and kinda carries the metadata so I think those are fine to stay. The potentially problematic ones are the ones instructing the model what to do next or what is available (e.g., scrap tools are unavailable, answer based only on snippets).

So yeah I think you can unconditionally include the metadata part but make the behavioral part configurable.

[fccview]

Hey @quackerd I have updated things a little.

You should be able to add guidance: false to output to fully remove guidance (output was already used to define the mode, so it made sense to just add an extra global value there).

Should be much smoother, give it a try (you'll need to pull the latest rebuild), if it works feel free to close, if you have any concern comment back and we can work through it, this is very very valuable stuff, so please don't hold back ❤️

[quackerd]

Closing. Confirmed that scrape and search respect the new guidance parameter and dropped behavioral hints.