Searching with Spider

Table of Contents

• Instant Search
• Search Endpoint Usage
  • Request Parameters
  • Example Request (Python)
• Search Results Format
• Combo Search and Crawl
  • Benefits:
• Rate Limits

Instant Search

Spider offers lightning-fast search capabilities, delivering results in under 2 seconds depending on the query. This enables instant access to live web data, making it ideal for:

• Feeding real-time content into large language models (LLMs)
• Building intelligent agents and data pipelines
• Crawling and collecting fresh, targeted data

Search Endpoint Usage

POST /search
Use this endpoint to compile a list of relevant websites for crawling and resource collection.

Request Parameters

• search (required) – The search query to execute
• limit (optional) – Maximum number of pages to crawl per domain (default: 0 = crawl all)
• search_limit – Number of top results to return (e.g. 3)
• return_format – Choose output format ("markdown", "json", etc.)
• fetch_page_content (optional) – If true, the search will perform a crawl to gather the content (costs apply)
• store_data (optional) – If true, data will be cached for reuse (costs apply)

⚠️ Tip: Set a crawl limit for unknown domains to avoid excessive requests.

Example Request (Python)

import requests, os

headers = {
  'Authorization': f'Bearer {os.getenv("SPIDER_API_KEY")}',
  'Content-Type': 'application/json',
}

json_data = {
  "search": "sports news today",
  "search_limit": 3,
  "limit": 5,
  "return_format": "markdown"
}

response = requests.post('https://api.spider.cloud/search', headers=headers, json=json_data)
print(response.json())

Search Results Format

The API returns structured results as an array of objects:

[
	{
		"title": "ESPN – Serving Sports Fans. Anytime. Anywhere.",
		"description": "Visit ESPN for live scores, highlights and sports news. Stream exclusive games on ESPN+ and play fantasy sports.",
		"url": "https://www.espn.com/"
	},
	{
		"title": "Sports Illustrated",
		"description": "SI.com provides sports news, expert analysis, highlights, stats and scores for the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, college football, soccer...",
		"url": "https://www.si.com/"
	}
]

Combo Search and Crawl

Spider allows combo operations — search the web and crawl selected results in a single workflow.

Benefits:

• Gather deeper structured content from top search results
• Automate extraction for real-time summaries, scraping, or analysis
• Reduce steps and latency in data workflows.

Rate Limits

• Spider Search is designed for high-throughput use. We support:
• Up to 50,000 search requests per minute
• Multiple search providers — not limited to Google
• Scalable, distributed crawling and parsing