Qry – CLI web search that always outputs JSON, with swappable back ends

I wanted web search I could pipe. Every tool I found either had an interactive UI (ddgr, googler), required a single paid API, or returned HTML. I wanted something that composes: pipe to jq, feed to an agent, use in scripts, no friction.

So I built qry. It's a hub binary that routes queries to adapter binaries via stdin/stdout JSON. The hub knows nothing about search engines. Adapters know nothing about routing. You swap adapters in a config file.

Four adapters today, three require no API key:

- DDG Lite scraping

- Brave Search HTML scraping

- Exa AI via the public MCP endpoint

- Brave Search API (requires key)

``` $ qry "numpy latest version"

[{"title":"...","url":"...","snippet":"..."}]

```

Install:

```

mise use -g go:github.com/justestif/qry@latest

mise use -g go:github.com/justestif/qry/adapters/qry-adapter-ddg-scrape@latest

mise reshim ```

The adapter protocol is plain stdin/stdout JSON so adapters can be written in any language. Docs on building one are in the repo.

https://github.com/justEstif/qry