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Web search and fetch

Access the live internet directly from your prompt. In this guide, you’ll learn how to search for up-to-date documentation, fetch deep context from specific URLs, and apply that knowledge to your code.

Prerequisites

Section titled “Prerequisites”
  • Gemini CLI installed and authenticated.
  • An internet connection.

How to research new technologies

Section titled “How to research new technologies”

Imagine you want to use a library released yesterday. The model doesn’t know about it yet. You need to teach it.

Scenario: Find documentation

Section titled “Scenario: Find documentation”

Prompt: Search for the 'Bun 1.0' release notes and summarize the key changes.

Gemini uses the google_web_search tool to find relevant pages and synthesizes an answer. This “grounding” process ensures the agent isn’t hallucinating features that don’t exist.

Prompt: Find the documentation for the 'React Router v7' loader API.

How to fetch deep context

Section titled “How to fetch deep context”

Search gives you a summary, but sometimes you need the raw details. The web_fetch tool lets you feed a specific URL directly into the agent’s context.

Scenario: Reading a blog post

Section titled “Scenario: Reading a blog post”

You found a blog post with the exact solution to your bug.

Prompt: Read https://example.com/fixing-memory-leaks and explain how to apply it to my code.

Gemini will retrieve the page content (stripping away ads and navigation) and use it to answer your question.

Scenario: Comparing sources

Section titled “Scenario: Comparing sources”

You can even fetch multiple pages to compare approaches.

Prompt: Compare the pagination patterns in https://api.example.com/v1/docs and https://api.example.com/v2/docs.

How to apply knowledge to code

Section titled “How to apply knowledge to code”

The real power comes when you combine web tools with file editing.

Workflow:

  1. Search: “How do I implement auth with Supabase?”
  2. Fetch: “Read this guide: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/auth.”
  3. Implement: “Great. Now use that pattern to create an auth.ts file in my project.”

How to troubleshoot errors

Section titled “How to troubleshoot errors”

When you hit an obscure error message, paste it into the chat.

Prompt: I'm getting 'Error: hydration mismatch' in Next.js. Search for recent solutions.

The agent will search sources such as GitHub issues, StackOverflow, and forums to find relevant fixes that might be too new to be in its base training set.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”