Answering Questions with Google Search

A simple form of question-answering that works with Google Search

You can use the SearchTool (opens in a new tab) to help your agent answer questions from Google Search results.

Using this tool only requires that you provide one argument:

• ai_description - Tells your agent how and when to use the tool.

For example, if you want to give your agent the ability to answer questions about historical events, you might say:

from steamship.agents.tools.search.search import SearchTool
 
tool = SearchTool(
    ai_description=(
        "Used to answer questions about historical events. "
        "The input is a question about a historical event. "
        "The output is the answer to the question."
    )
)

Building an Agent with SearchTool

This tool can be provided to a FunctionsBasedAgent (opens in a new tab) which will decide when to use it based on its ai_description. For example, if the tool's ai_description says the tool is "used to answer question about historical events", then the agent will tend to use the tool when the user asks a question that matches that use.

In your AgentService, here's how you can provide this tool to a FunctionsBasedAgent (opens in a new tab):

# Create an instance of the tool
from steamship.agents.tools.search.search import SearchTool
search_tool = SearchTool(
    ai_description="..." # See above
)
 
# Create the AgentService's agent, providing it the tool
self._agent = FunctionsBasedAgent(
    tools=[
        search_tool,
    ],
    llm=OpenAI(self.client),
)

A full, working example can be found at TODO.

Deploying an AgentService with SearchTool

To deploy an agent with this tool, just make sure it's properly wrapped in an AgentService wrapper and then follow the normal deployment instructions. You will get a URL that you can visit to create instances of your agent in the cloud and connect to it from the web & chat apps.

Customizing the Behavior of SearchTool

Steamship tools are just open-source Python. The source for this tool is available here (opens in a new tab). You can customize it by copy-pasting the tool into your own project, changing the code, and then using your new version.

This particular tool works by creating a prompt that:

1. Uses Steamship's managed SERP service to ask Google the input question
2. Returns that input question to the end-user

If you create an interesting customization of this tool, please consider sending us a pull request on GitHub (opens in a new tab)!