Handling live web search in MCP agents without flooding the context window
Few_Training_8950 · reddit · 2026-10-14
A developer shares practical lessons on giving MCP agents live web access: the challenge isn't calling a search tool but what the agent receives. Raw SERPs or full pages fill context with navigation, scripts and low-value text, degrading reasoning. Their approach uses Octen to return ranked results with relevant passages and source URLs instead of whole pages. They ask how others handle it — full pages, extracted text, or snippets — and whether context pollution matters more than search quality.
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