> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://kestrel.mintlify.site/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Search options

> Control providers, ranking, retrieval, concurrency, and output.

# Search options

## Choose a search engine

Kestrel Search supports DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Yahoo.

```bash theme={null}
kestrelsearch search "python typing" --engine bing
```

## Use fallback mode

Try providers in order until one succeeds:

```bash theme={null}
kestrelsearch search "python typing" \
  --engine duckduckgo \
  --engine bing \
  --mode fallback
```

## Search providers concurrently

```bash theme={null}
kestrelsearch search "python typing" \
  --engine bing \
  --engine yahoo \
  --mode fanout
```

## Run multiple queries

Repeat `-q` or `--query`. A positional query is optional when at least one
query option is present:

```bash theme={null}
kestrelsearch search \
  -q "python typing" \
  -q "pyright documentation" \
  --mode fanout
```

You can also combine the forms, for example
`kestrelsearch search "python typing" -q "pyright documentation"`.

## Return recent results

Use `d`, `w`, `m`, or `y` for day, week, month, or year:

```bash theme={null}
kestrelsearch search "Python news" --time-filter w
```

## Skip page retrieval

For a faster snippet-only search:

```bash theme={null}
kestrelsearch search "OpenAI news" --no-fetch
```

## Return JSON

```bash theme={null}
kestrelsearch search "Rust ownership" --output json
```

## Control result count

```bash theme={null}
kestrelsearch search "climate change" --top-k 3
```

## Tune retrieval resources

Search requests, page downloads, and HTML parsing have separate concurrency
limits:

```bash theme={null}
kestrelsearch search "machine learning" \
  --search-concurrency 4 \
  --concurrency 8 \
  --parse-concurrency 4
```

Bound the number and size of fetched pages:

```bash theme={null}
kestrelsearch search "machine learning" \
  --top-k 5 \
  --fetch-candidates 10 \
  --max-response-bytes 1000000 \
  --content-limit 3000
```

`--fetch-candidates` defaults to three times `--top-k`. Increasing it may
improve ranking recall but also increases network, parsing, and downstream
token costs.

Run the following command for the complete option reference:

```bash theme={null}
kestrelsearch search --help
```

See the [CLI reference](/reference/cli) for every option and default.