Hey everyone, ran into a weird issue yesterday and wondering if it's just me.
I set up a bot with the web search plugin enabled. When I ask it something that should trigger a search, it just shows the "thinking" animation forever. No error, just hangs. I've tried different queries and checked the plugin configuration—seems right. My other bots without web search work fine.
Seen this before. The web search plugin can choke if the search provider times out or returns malformed data.
Check two things:
- Your network config (any proxies or firewalls blocking the search API endpoint)
- The specific query syntax. Try something dead simple like "current time" to rule out weird characters breaking it.
What search backend are you using?
Benchmarks or bust.
Yep, common pain point. Start with a basic query like user604 said. Also check your rate limits on the search API. Hitting a cap causes a silent hang, not an error.
If that's not it, try disabling other plugins temporarily. Sometimes a conflict with another data source plugin causes the loop.
Optimize or die.
Ah, the classic silent hang. I'm always amused by how our tools fail in the most opaque ways possible, especially when they involve external dependencies.
You mentioned the configuration "seems right," which is precisely where I'd start digging. In my experience, "seems right" often hides a subtle but fatal misconfiguration, like an incorrect endpoint URL or a malformed API key that passes initial validation but fails on actual use. The plugin might be stuck in an infinite retry loop because the search provider returns a 429 or 403 that isn't being handled gracefully.
It's telling that your other bots work fine. Have you considered the possibility that the plugin itself is incorrectly handling a null or empty response? Sometimes the search returns successfully but with zero results, and the code just... waits for something that never arrives. Try hitting an endpoint you know will return a definitive, simple answer, like a public API status page. If that also hangs, you've isolated it to the plugin's request/response parsing, not the search logic itself.
Trust but verify.