pi-mimo-search

Web search tool for Pi backed by the Xiaomi MiMo Web Search plugin — pay-as-you-go, with structured citations and per-call cost reporting.

Pi has no built-in web search. MiMo offers one, but only as a server-side plugin on its OpenAI-compatible Chat Completions API (tools: [{ "type": "web_search" }]). This package exposes it to Pi as a regular agent tool:

web_search(query="...")
  -> answer + numbered source citations
  -> [search cost: CNY 0.0160 plugin fee + $0.00020 tokens = $0.00243 total]

Features

• Works with any main model — the search is a side-call to MiMo's PAYG endpoint; your conversation can stay on a Token Plan model, Anthropic, anything.
• Structured citations — url_citation annotations are parsed and returned (title, site, publish time, summary) as tool structuredContent, not dropped.
• Cost visibility — every call reports the plugin fee (CNY) and token cost (USD) it just incurred; totals are folded into Pi's session usage so you can reconcile against the MiMo console.
• Cost controls — max_keyword: 1 default (each keyword = one billed plugin invocation), capped limit, intent-recognition mode by default (force_search off), mimo-v2.6-flash with thinking disabled for the side-call.
• Actionable errors — 401 (key), 402 (balance), the webSearchEnabled gate, and 429 each come back with the exact fix.

Quick Start

Five steps from zero to a working search. Steps 1-2 happen in the MiMo console, steps 3-5 in your terminal.

1. Create a PAYG API key Go to API Keys and create a key. It must be the pay-as-you-go key format sk-... — a Token Plan key (tp-...) will not work, web search is PAYG-only.

2. Top up balance and activate the plugin

• Top up at Account Balance — CNY 10 is plenty for ~600 searches (see billing).
• Activate the Web Search Plugin at Plugin Management.
• Wait ~5 minutes after toggling — the switch has a server-side cache.

3. Give Pi the key

Start Pi and run inside the session:

/login xiaomi

Choose the login prompt and paste your sk-... key. It is stored in ~/.pi/agent/auth.json (mode 600); the extension never reads it directly.

Alternative for headless/CI setups — environment variable (exact name matters), in e.g. ~/.zshrc:

export XIAOMI_API_KEY="sk-..."

4. Install the package

pi install npm:pi-mimo-search     # or: pi install git:github.com/rioliu/pi-mimo-search

Restart Pi (or run /reload).

5. Verify

First confirm the tool is registered — in a shell:

pi --print "Reply with exactly: TOOLS: <comma-separated list of your tool names>"
# expect web_search in the output

Then do a live search (~CNY 0.02) — open Pi and ask anything that needs current information:

> 武汉今天适合户外跑步吗？帮我搜一下天气

Abridged, your transcript shows the tool call and its result:

web_search(query="武汉今天天气")
  根据搜索结果，武汉今天天气晴朗，当前温度25度，湿度38%…

  Sources:
  1. 武汉市天气 空气质量 降水 预警 - https://www.qweather.com/weather/wuhan-101200101.html (和风天气, 2026-10-07)

  [search cost: CNY 0.0160 plugin fee + $0.00025 tokens = $0.00247 total]

If the answer and cost line appear, you are done. If anything failed, jump to Troubleshooting.

Usage

Just ask the model to search, or let it decide — the tool description tells it when search is appropriate. Model-driven intent recognition is the default: it searches for live information (news, prices, weather, releases) and skips questions it can answer from memory, so idle conversation costs nothing.

Force a search when the model is too confident:

> web_search: latest pi coding agent release notes, force=true

Parameters

Programmatic results

The result's structuredContent (declared via outputSchema) carries:

{
  "answer": "...",
  "citations": [{ "url": "...", "title": "...", "siteName": "...", "publishTime": "...", "summary": "..." }],
  "usage": { "promptTokens": 954, "completionTokens": 400, "reasoningTokens": 0,
             "pluginInvocations": 1, "pages": 1 },
  "cost": { "tokensUsd": 0.00025, "pluginFeeCny": 0.016, "totalUsd": 0.00247 }
}

Available to codemode scripts and other programmatic callers; the model-facing content is the answer plus source list plus the one-line cost summary.

How billing works

MiMo charges the plugin separately from tokens and separately from Token Plan quota:

• Plugin fee: CNY 16 / 1,000 invocations (CN region; USD 5 / 1,000 overseas). One search round fires up to max_keyword concurrent keyword searches = that many invocations.
• Tokens: search content is injected into the side-call prompt — flash-model prices, charged to your PAYG balance.

Typical call: max_keyword: 1 → CNY 0.016 + a few hundred flash tokens ≈ CNY 0.02. CNY 50 ≈ 3,000+ searches.

The tool prints its own cost line per call and returns the same numbers structurally, so session totals stay reconcilable with the Billing console.

Troubleshooting

Uninstall

pi remove npm:pi-mimo-search      # or the git: source you installed

Architecture

Pi session                          MiMo
  main conversation  ────────────>  your normal provider (Token Plan, Claude, ...)
  web_search tool    ────────────>  api.xiaomimimo.com/v1  (PAYG balance)
                                     model: mimo-v2.6-flash (thinking off)
                                     tools: [{type: web_search, max_keyword: 1, ...}]
                                     -> answer + annotations + web_search_usage

Auth resolution uses Pi's built-in xiaomi provider: stored /login credential first, XIAOMI_API_KEY env fallback. The extension itself never reads key material.

FAQ

Why not inject web_search into every request (native mode)? That works when your main model is MiMo PAYG — see jianjye/pi-mimo-web-search for that approach. A side-call tool differs: it works with any main provider (including Token Plan models, which MiMo gates off from search), keeps structured citations instead of losing them to Pi's stream normalization, and makes each search's cost explicit. The two styles are complementary.

Token Plan: web search tool found in the request body, but webSearchEnabled is false? Web search is PAYG-only. The flag stays off on token-plan-* endpoints regardless of plugin activation — verified empirically. Use a sk- key on api.xiaomimimo.com (this tool does exactly that).

Can I change the search model or FX rate? Token rates and the CNY→USD conversion live in COST in extensions/search.ts; the model id is the MODEL constant.

Development

git clone https://github.com/rioliu/pi-mimo-search
cd pi-mimo-search
npm test          # 12 unit tests, plain node (no deps), fixture from a real API response
pi install ./pi-mimo-search   # load from the checkout while iterating

Layout:

extensions/index.ts    # tool registration, auth, fetch, result assembly
extensions/search.ts   # pure logic: payload, parser, cost math, error mapping (unit-tested)
test/search.test.ts

License

MIT