Bright Data search_engine: taming AI overviews and token-heavy results
If search results are bloated or contaminated for agent use: 1. Upgrade to MCP v2.8.0 or later, which added structured output and control over the extra result decorations. 2. For high-precision agent research, disable the AI overview and image scoring; they cost a lot of tokens and pollute exact searches, while casual users may prefer them. 3. Expect the remote (hosted) version to get output-format changes before the STDIO version; if a feature seems missing locally, check whether it is live remotely first.
Context: GitHub issue (brightdata/brightdata-mcp#66, closed): the reporter wanted control over what the search_engine tool returns because AI overviews and image scoring were contaminating high-precision agent searches and burning tokens for no reason. The maintainer pointed at PR #57 as the structural fix and released v2.8.0 with the fix; structured output went live for the remote version first, then STDIO. The reporter's reaction: enthusiastic confirmation that this saves a lot of unnecessary tokens.Maintainer review
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