can1357/oh-my-pi · error · SearchProviderError

Ecosia search failed: ${message}

Error message

Ecosia search failed: ${message}

What it means

Thrown as a SearchProviderError from the Ecosia HTML scraping provider when any unexpected exception occurs during the search request/parsing pipeline. It is a catch-all wrapper: the original error's message (network failure, HTML parse failure, etc.) is embedded into 'Ecosia search failed: <message>'. Timeouts and aborts are handled separately with dedicated codes, so this indicates a non-timeout, non-abort failure.

Source

Thrown at packages/coding-agent/src/web/search/providers/ecosia.ts:131

			signal,
			timeoutMs: params.timeoutMs,
			referer: ECOSIA_HOME_URL,
			browser: {
				homeUrl: ECOSIA_HOME_URL,
				ready: {
					selector: 'article[data-test-id="organic-result"]',
					timeoutMs: RESULT_RENDER_TIMEOUT_MS,
				},
				shouldFallback: isBlockedPage,
			},
		});
	} catch (error) {
		if (error instanceof SearchProviderError || params.signal?.aborted) throw error;
		if (signal.aborted) {
			throw new SearchProviderError("ecosia", "Ecosia search timed out.", 504);
		}
		const message = error instanceof Error ? error.message : String(error);
		throw new SearchProviderError("ecosia", `Ecosia search failed: ${message}`, 503);
	}

	if (isBlockedPage(page)) {
		throw new SearchProviderError(
			"ecosia",
			"Ecosia blocked the request with a Cloudflare bot challenge. Ecosia's firewall throttles automated searches from datacenter/shared-egress IPs; try another web search provider such as DuckDuckGo, Brave, or Tavily.",
			429,
		);
	}
	if (page.status < 200 || page.status >= 300) {
		const classified = classifyProviderHttpError("ecosia", page.status, page.html);
		if (classified) throw classified;
		throw new SearchProviderError("ecosia", `Ecosia HTML error (${page.status})`, page.status);
	}
	return page.html;
}

/** Execute an Ecosia web search and parse the server-rendered result page. */

View on GitHub (pinned to 9690622007)

Solutions

  1. Check outbound network connectivity to https://www.ecosia.org from the machine running the agent (curl -v https://www.ecosia.org).
  2. Read the embedded <message> for the root cause and fix that underlying issue (DNS, proxy, TLS).
  3. Switch to a JSON-API-based provider (DuckDuckGo, Brave, Tavily) which is less fragile than HTML scraping.
  4. Retry once after a short delay if the underlying message suggests a transient network fault.

Example fix

// before
const results = await search({ provider: "ecosia", query });
// after
try {
  const results = await search({ provider: "ecosia", query });
} catch (e) {
  if (e instanceof SearchProviderError && e.provider === "ecosia") {
    const results = await search({ provider: "duckduckgo", query }); // fallback
  } else throw e;
}
Defensive patterns

Strategy: try-catch

Type guard

function isSearchProviderError(e: unknown): e is SearchProviderError {
  return e instanceof SearchProviderError;
}

Try / catch

try {
  const res = await search({ provider: "ecosia", query });
} catch (e) {
  if (e instanceof SearchProviderError && e.provider === "ecosia") {
    // inspect e.message for the root cause; fall back to another provider
  } else throw e;
}

Prevention

When it happens

Trigger: Any exception thrown inside callEcosiaHtml that is not a SearchProviderError and not an abort: fetch failing with connection reset/DNS failure, TLS errors, or the HTML result parser throwing on malformed markup. Signal aborted cases and timeouts are routed to other branches.

Common situations: Corporate proxies or firewalls resetting connections to ecosia.org; transient DNS failures; Ecosia changing its HTML markup so the scraper's extraction code throws; running in an environment without outbound network access.

Understand the failure class

Background: 'Something went wrong' / 'Request failed (500)' / 'HTTP error! status: 404' — what failed HTTP requests actually mean and how to find the real cause — this error's family across 28 libraries.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of can1357/oh-my-pi@9690622007 (2026-08-31). Data as JSON: /api/errors/9d5f4fcc3a80503e. Report an issue: GitHub.