ScrapeGraphAI/Scrapegraph-ai · error · SearchConfigError

Invalid search configuration: {str(e)}

Error message

Invalid search configuration: {str(e)}

What it means

Raised by search_on_web when engine-specific validation fails with ValueError before/during the search, wrapped into SearchConfigError. It signals a malformed configuration rather than a network problem.

Source

Thrown at scrapegraphai/utils/research_web.py:243

        elif config.search_engine == "searxng":
            results = _search_searxng(
                config.query, config.max_results, config.port, config.timeout
            )

        elif config.search_engine == "serper":
            results = _search_serper(
                config.query, config.max_results, config.serper_api_key, config.timeout
            )

        return filter_pdf_links(results)

    except requests.Timeout:
        raise TimeoutError(f"Search request timed out after {timeout} seconds")
    except requests.RequestException as e:
        raise SearchRequestError(f"Search request failed: {str(e)}")
    except ValueError as e:
        raise SearchConfigError(f"Invalid search configuration: {str(e)}")


def _search_duckduckgo(
    query: str, max_results: int, proxy: Optional[str] = None
) -> List[str]:
    """
    Helper function for DuckDuckGo search using the ``ddgs`` package.

    The ``duckduckgo-search`` package was renamed to ``ddgs``; recent
    ``langchain-community`` releases import ``from ddgs import DDGS``, which
    silently broke the previous langchain-based implementation. This calls
    ``ddgs`` directly so results no longer depend on parsing a formatted string.

    Args:
        query (str): Search query
        max_results (int): Maximum number of results to return
        proxy (str, optional): Proxy configuration

View on GitHub (pinned to 532dfffbf6)

Solutions

1. Check the engine string against supported engines (google, bing, duckduckgo, searxng, serper)
2. Validate max_results and timeout are positive ints before calling
3. Upgrade scrapegraphai if the engine was added in a newer release

Example fix

// before
config = SearchConfig(query="x", search_engine="googel")
// after
config = SearchConfig(query="x", search_engine="google")

SUPPORTED = {"google", "bing", "duckduckgo", "searxng", "serper"}
assert config.search_engine in SUPPORTED, f"unknown engine {config.search_engine}"
assert isinstance(config.max_results, int) and config.max_results > 0

def is_valid_engine(name: str) -> bool:
    return name in {"google", "bing", "duckduckgo", "searxng", "serper"}

try:
    results = search_on_web(config)
except SearchConfigError as e:
    raise ValueError(f"fix search config: {e}") from e

When it happens

Trigger: Calling search_on_web with an invalid or missing search engine name, a bad max_results value, or a malformed query that a backend validates with ValueError. The test_invalid_search_engine case shows an unknown engine string triggers it.

Common situations: Typos in the engine name ('googel' vs 'google'), passing an engine not supported by the installed version, wrong types for max_results/timeout.

Understand the failure class

Background: "Invalid value" and "allowed values are" config errors: what your library rejected and how to fix it — this error's family across 41 libraries.

Related errors

• The browserbase module is not installed. Please install it u
• Search engine must be one of: {', '.join(valid_engines)}
• LLM configuration must include an 'api_key'.
• langchain_google_genai is not installed. Please install it u
• The 'graphviz' library is required for this functionality. P

AI-assisted analysis of ScrapeGraphAI/Scrapegraph-ai@532dfffbf6 (2026-08-28). Data as JSON: /api/errors/7080ce153ade2ba7. Report an issue: GitHub.