infobroker

Infobroker

One server. Every source. Research that delivers.

Infobroker is a multi-provider MCP server that unifies web search, structured knowledge, academic, archive, and content-extraction APIs behind a single tool surface. Twenty-one zero-config providers ship in the box — search the web, look up facts, fetch articles — with nothing to configure. Five more providers unlock with API keys or self-hosting. A built-in corroboration engine cross-references independent sources to separate established facts from contested claims. Bundled client skills transform raw research into polished writing. Free first. Privacy always.

• North Star
• Quick Start
• MCP Server
• Skills
• Providers
• Configuration
• How It Compares
• Contribute
• License
• Spec

North Star

Infobroker is the Bothan Spynet as a tool — a decentralized intelligence network that queries independent sources and routes results through a single, impartial interface. In intelligence-cycle terms, you supply the direction and get the dissemination; the server handles the collection and processing.

Quick Start

cd Infobroker && npm install && npm run start

Add this to your OpenCode config (~/.config/opencode/opencode.json):

{
  "instructions": [
    "<path-to-Infobroker>/instructions/search-preferences.md"
  ],
  "skills": {
    "paths": [
      "<path-to-Infobroker>/skills",
      "<path-to-opencode-config>/skills"
    ]
  },
  "mcp": {
    "infobroker": {
      "type": "local",
      "command": ["node_modules/.bin/tsx", "src/index.ts"],
      "cwd": "<path-to-Infobroker>",
      "environment": {
        "INFOBROKER_CONFIG": "<path-to-Infobroker>/config.json"
      }
    }
  }
}

The mcp block starts the server; the instructions and skills blocks are what activate the bundled client skills. Without them the skills ship in the repository but stay inert.

Free providers work immediately. API-keyed providers — Brave, Exa, Tavily, Yep — unlock higher throughput and specialized search; self-hosted SearXNG gives full query privacy:

export INFOBROKER_BRAVE_API_KEY="your-key"
export INFOBROKER_EXA_API_KEY="your-key"

Requirements: Node.js 20+.

MCP Server

Your research backend. Seven tools, twenty-six providers, one corroboration engine. The complete feature inventory is documented in the feature taxonomy in the spec.

Unified Search

"Search for the location of the second Death Star." "Find scholarly papers on hyperspace travel theories." "Search the latest astromech specs and show me the passages that answer: does the R2 unit pre-date the Clone Wars?"

search_web sends one query to every provider that can answer it. Search across DuckDuckGo, Wikipedia, academic databases, news, code repositories — or describe your task and the server picks the best source. Pass an array of queries to batch several searches in one call. Ask for a deep read and it fetches the top results and ranks each page's passages against your query, so you get the specific text that answers the question instead of links. Failed providers fall back silently through a configurable chain so you get results, not error messages. Other search tools lock you to one engine; Infobroker routes every query to the right provider and keeps going when one fails.

Content Extraction

"Fetch the article on the Battle of Yavin and summarize it." "Get the text of that page about the Death Star plans." "Where, in that report, does it mention the reactor core?"

fetch_page hands any URL to Jina Reader, which renders it as clean Markdown optimized for LLM consumption. Falls back to native HTTP when Jina is throttled. Wikipedia and Internet Archive have dedicated renderers for source-specific extraction. Ask a page a question — pass question to fetch_page and it returns the passages that answer it, each scored and ranked, instead of the whole document. Built-in web fetchers return raw HTML; Infobroker gives you clean, readable content from any source — ready for summarization or analysis. Fetch also reports the page's last-updated date when it can determine one, so you know how current your source is.

Citations

"Give me BibTeX references for papers on hyperdrive field dynamics."

get_citations searches scholarly sources and returns each reference as a formatted BibTeX entry with its fields — title, authors, year, venue, and URL — ready to paste into a reference list.

Provider Intelligence

"Which source should I use to research the Death Star's weakness?" "Show me all available sources and their quota status."

The server knows its own capabilities. search_web auto-selects the best backend for your task, weighing capability, quota, and latency — or routes by your intent when you ask for privacy, speed, or free-only sources. inspect_providers surfaces every configured source and drills into a single provider's uptime and error history. No other search MCP server gives you operational visibility into every backend.

Multi-Source Verification

"Verify whether the Empire really destroyed Alderaan." "Find the consensus on who fired first — Han or Greedo."

verify_claims runs a multi-pass truth-finding loop: broad search across your highest-authority providers — search engines, encyclopedias, and scholarly indexes — then claim extraction, cross-source reconciliation, and targeted follow-up for gaps, dispatched in parallel and stopping early once the truth is pinned down. Claims corroborated across independent sources score high confidence, weighted by each source's authority; every source is bound to the claim it supports. Contradictions are surfaced with all perspectives. Gaps trigger refined queries that broaden to the rest of your providers. It also remembers: prior findings in your knowledge base participate as corroborating sources before it queries the network. You get a structured report — confirmed, contested, and unverified findings — with source provenance, per-source claims, and confidence scores. Every other search tool returns a list of links; Infobroker finds the truth and tells you how sure it is.

Knowledge Base

"Search what you already found about the Rebel Alliance fleet." "Ingest this article so it's cached for next time."

Every search, fetch, and corroboration run is cached in a local knowledge base. manage_kb checks the cache before hitting external providers — only falling back to the network when the cached results aren't fresh enough or relevant enough. Its actions ingest new text or a URL by hand, report what's cached, and remove content. Content is age-scored, expired on a freshness schedule, and deduplicated by source. Beyond the cache, manage_kb archives the reports you generate: ingest with source_type: "report" (and default to the knowledge base) and revisit them with manage_kb list and manage_kb get, or write them to a local directory instead. Each archived report records its source's last-updated date, so you can compare it against the live source and refresh only what has actually changed. Other search MCP servers re-fetch the same facts every session; Infobroker remembers and reuses what it already found.

Research Pipeline

"Research the construction of the Death Star, then draft a summary." "Fact-check these claims about Darth Vader's origin."

Infobroker doesn't stop at search results. Bundled client skills chain its tools into writing pipelines, routing every request through a solved workflow shape and the writing sub-skills until a finished document comes out the other end. Everything lives in the repository — no external paths or separate install. The full pipeline — the six skills, the workflow shapes, and the escalation path — is detailed in the Skills section. Other search MCP servers produce search results; Infobroker produces finished work.

Operational Visibility

"Show server health." "Hot-reload my config without restarting."

Quota counters persist to disk and survive restarts. Rate limits are enforced per-provider, not globally. Configuration is hot-reloadable via reload_config — change providers, adjust chains, or tweak thresholds without dropping connections. search_web doubles as DuckDuckGo query autocomplete. inspect_providers reports the server's build health and request stats. You always know what your search server is doing and how much capacity remains.

Skills

The MCP server is one half of the product. The bundled skills are the other. Six client skills ship in the repository — no external dependency, no separate install — and they turn raw research into finished work.

The orchestrator skill (infobroker) opens with a classify gate that maps your request to a workflow shape: research-and-write, fact-check, deep-dive, competitive evaluation, literature review, monitoring, red-team, vetting, or gated analysis. Each shape composes the same primitives — recall from the knowledge base, search, extract, verify, write, and cite — into its own sequence and ends with a grep-able completion token so you can confirm the outcome. Four writing sub-skills execute the writing phases: summarization condenses findings before writing, technical-writing drafts reports and docs, proofreading polishes language, and translation produces multilingual output.

Gated analysis is the escalation shape. When a question is high-stakes or decision-driving, the classify gate routes to the analysis-loop skill — a disciplined path with confidence-scored findings, source-reliability grading, and structured analytic techniques chosen by fit and named with a rationale — rather than the lighter research-and-write route. It shares the same primitives and Infobroker tools but runs its own gated workflow, so you get the rigor without leaving the pipeline.

A single instruction file, search-preferences.md, routes your client toward these tools: the knowledge base first, external providers only when the cache falls short. Wire it and the skills directory into your OpenCode config once — the Quick Start above shows the exact snippet — and every research request follows the pipeline automatically.

Write your own skill into skills/ to add a workflow shape of your own. The pipeline diagram lives in references/pipeline-map.md and the workflow-shape definitions in references/workflows.md. Other search MCP servers return links; Infobroker ships the writers that turn them into documented answers.

Providers

Twenty-six providers. Twenty-one work with zero configuration.

Provider	Tier	Type	Key Required
DuckDuckGo	Built-in	Web search	No
Jina Reader	Free HTTP	Content extraction	No
Wikipedia	Free HTTP	Encyclopedia	No
Wiktionary	Free HTTP	Dictionary	No
Wikidata	Free HTTP	Structured facts	No
OpenStreetMap	Free HTTP	Geocoding	No
Internet Archive	Free HTTP	Historical	No
arXiv	Free HTTP	Academic	No
Semantic Scholar	Free HTTP	Academic	Optional
Stack Exchange	Free HTTP	Code Q&A	Optional
GitHub	Free HTTP	Code search	Optional
CORE	Free HTTP	Open access	Optional
OpenAlex	Free HTTP	Academic	No
Europe PMC	Free HTTP	Academic	No
Hacker News	Free HTTP	News	No
GDELT	Free HTTP	News	No
SEC EDGAR	Free HTTP	Financial filings	No
World Bank	Free HTTP	Economic data	No
Marginalia	Built-in	Small web	No
Mojeek	Built-in	Independent index	No
Wiby	Built-in	Small web	No
Brave Search	Keyed HTTP	Web, News	Yes
Exa	Keyed HTTP	Semantic	Yes
Tavily	Keyed HTTP	Synthesis	Yes
Yep	Keyed HTTP	Web, Semantic	Yes
SearXNG	Self-hosted	Full privacy	Yes (self)

Built-in and free-HTTP providers are active out of the box. Keyed providers enable with an API key. Self-hosted providers point at a server you run yourself:

export INFOBROKER_BRAVE_API_KEY="BSA-..."
export INFOBROKER_SEARXNG_URL="http://localhost:8080"

Then set "enabled": true in config.json for the provider.

SearXNG is the only shipped self-hosted provider, and it is optional through and through. Nothing in the server requires it, and nothing is bundled or installed on its behalf — SearXNG runs as a container you operate, and Infobroker queries its JSON endpoint like any other backend. Leave it disabled (the default) and you lose nothing: the privacy-critical chain still serves via DuckDuckGo and Mojeek. Enable it only when you want full query privacy, in which case only your own SearXNG instance sees your queries.

Configuration

Variable	Purpose
INFOBROKER_CONFIG	Path to config.json (default: ./config.json)
INFOBROKER_CONFIG_LOCAL	Optional path to a user config layer (default: config.local.json)
INFOBROKER_<NAME>_API_KEY	API key for keyed providers
INFOBROKER_<NAME>_URL	URL for self-hosted providers

config.json ships with the repository and holds the defaults: which providers are enabled, their priority in fallback chains, rate limits, corroboration parameters, and the task-to-provider dispatch table. Hot-reloadable via reload_config — edit the file, call the tool, and changes take effect without a restart.

Your own overrides live in a separate user layer — config.local.json in the project directory (or a path you set via INFOBROKER_CONFIG_LOCAL). This file is git-ignored, so pulling updates from the repository never overwrites your settings. Values in the user layer take precedence over the shipped defaults; anything left out falls back to config.json.

The knowledge base ships empty. By default it writes to a user-scoped path (~/.local/share/infobroker/knowledge-base) outside the repository, so the content you research and cache stays on your machine and is never committed. Each deployed instance accumulates its own store.

Knowledge base encryption

Research reports and cached pages can be sensitive, and the knowledge base stores them in a single file in your home directory. Enable optional at-rest encryption by adding a kb.encryption block and supplying a key:

{
  "kb": {
    "encryption": { "enabled": true, "key_file": "~/.config/infobroker/kb.key" }
  }
}

The key file (plain, 0600) is the most reliable source across MCP clients and operating systems; INFOBROKER_KB_KEY (a 32-byte key) or INFOBROKER_KB_PASSPHRASE (a passphrase) also work. Generate a key with openssl rand -base64 32. Encryption protects the store and disk-saved reports from anyone who obtains the files without the key — device theft, backup or cloud-sync leaks, other local accounts. It does not protect against a malicious MCP client on the same machine, or malware, which full-disk encryption covers.

Two rules keep this safe. First, encryption is your opt-in: if the key is missing or wrong, the knowledge base locks and reports an error rather than touching your data — so back up the key (a forgotten key or passphrase means the store is unrecoverable by design). Second, the server never writes a partial file: every save is atomic, and an unrecognized or newer store format is never overwritten.

The manage_kb tool's encryption action is the day-to-day surface for this journey, and it never echoes secret material — generate_key and backup return file paths, and rekey reads a key file rather than a raw key.

Enable by generating a key, backing it up, adding the kb.encryption block, and reloading; the store is encrypted in place immediately. Disable by removing the block and reloading; the store is decrypted to plaintext immediately (keep the key available during the transition so the server can read the store to decrypt it). Recover a locked store with status to see the state, verify to confirm a candidate key before committing it, backup to restore a copy of your key file, and rekey to move to a new key without losing content. After re-keying, point kb.encryption.key_file at the new key, reload, then run verify again to confirm the new key opens the store.

infobroker_manage_kb action=encryption operation=generate_key key_file=~/.local/share/infobroker/keys/kb.key
infobroker_manage_kb action=encryption operation=backup    key_file=~/.local/share/infobroker/keys/kb.key.bak
infobroker_reload_config

Tool-surface key operations (generate_key, backup, rekey's target) are confined to the keys directory: kb.keys_dir when configured, else the keys sibling of the knowledge base storage path (~/.local/share/infobroker/keys by default). A path outside that directory is refused. The kb.encryption.key_file configuration value is operator-owned and not subject to the confinement.

Add the kb.encryption block to config.local.json before reloading to enable, or remove it before reloading to disable. When the store is locked, status, verify, and rekey remain reachable so you can recover without first unlocking.

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