Search, Wikipedia & dictionary

This page covers four separate tools, each with its own panel and its own settings screen: Web search and Image search (backed by Brave, by Tavily with a key of your own, or by a SearXNG server you name on the F-Droid build), a three-tab Wikipedia reader, and an English dictionary. Web search, Image search, and Wikipedia never read what’s already in your field. You type a query into the panel’s own search bar, and nothing out of the field you’re typing in is sent anywhere. Dictionary is the one exception. With its auto-lookup setting on, which is the default, opening the tool reads your current selection or the word at the cursor and looks that up. See Looking up definitions below.

Web search results. Tap a row to insert its link, or tap the open icon to launch it in your browser.

Web and image search

Open Web search or Image search from the toolbar, or from the toolbox if you haven’t pinned them. Neither is pinned by default. On a hardware keyboard, double-tap Ctrl for the leader key, then press W for web search or I for image search.

Both tools run on the Brave Search API by default. Paste a Tavily key and they use Tavily instead, and on the F-Droid build a SearXNG instance you name comes before either. Typing routes into the panel’s own header search bar rather than your field, the same key-rerouting trick the GIF, sticker, and Wikipedia panels use. Unlike GIFs and stickers, neither search runs live as you type. Both wait for you to press the search action before firing a request.

Image search: tap a thumbnail to insert the image itself, or long-press to insert its link instead.

• Web search: tap a result to insert its URL at the cursor. A separate open-in-browser icon on each row launches the link in your browser instead, which leaves the keyboard entirely. They’re two distinct actions, and Open results in the browser swaps them: a tap opens the page, and the button beside it, now a link icon, inserts the address. Each row shows the title, host, and an HTML-stripped snippet.
• The search engine’s answer: when the backend writes a short answer to your query, it sits in a box above the results. Tavily writes one from the pages it found, and some SearXNG instances give instant answers; Brave doesn’t with a normal search key. The box shows four lines, a tap shows the rest, and Insert puts the whole answer in your text. Turn Show the answer from the search engine off to hide it.
• Image search: tap a thumbnail to download the full image and insert it directly, on the same commitContent path the clipboard and GIF tools use. Long-press a thumbnail to insert its URL as plain text instead. The grid dedupes results by image URL before drawing them, since Brave can return the same full-size image for more than one widely-reposted result.

To search with a picture instead of words, tap the camera button at the right of image search’s search bar. It opens the camera tool, and after the shutter the photo goes to Google Lens, a search site, or the share sheet, whichever Search with names on the camera tool’s settings page. Back from the camera returns you here.

Results stay put after you leave. Open one link in your browser, come back, and open the tool again: the same list is there under the same search, so reading several results costs one request, not one per visit, and the list can’t change under you. Tap the ✕ at the end of the search bar to clear it and start a new search, or tap the bar itself to edit the search you ran. Web search and image search each keep their own. They’re held in memory only, so they’re gone once Android closes the keyboard.

The Tools screen before a Brave API key is configured: the switch is greyed out.

Without something to search with, neither tool appears on the keyboard at all. There’s no button that opens a panel with nothing behind it. Until then the two tools are off the toolbar, out of the toolbox, and out of the smart chips, and a hardware shortcut bound to either one does nothing. On the Tools screen they’re still listed, with their switch greyed out and a reason in place of the usual description. Everywhere except the F-Droid build, that reads “Needs an API key. Press this row to add one.” The F-Droid build reads “Needs a SearXNG instance” instead, since it offers a self-hosted server as another way in. Fill in whichever the screen is asking for and both tools come straight back.

Options

WM Keyboard › Tools › Web search

Web search and image search are two separate tool screens, reached from Tools / Web search and Tools / Image search. They share almost the same settings block:

• Turn on: already on, like every tool. Switching it off removes that tool from both the toolbar and the toolbox. The switch can’t be pressed while there’s nothing to search with, since there’s nothing to turn on.
• Icon colour: only shown if colorful tool icons are turned on globally.
• SearXNG instance: F-Droid build only, blank by default. Paste the address of a SearXNG server, your own or one you trust, and both tools search it instead of Brave, even if a Brave key is also set. See Servers for the same field shared across tools. The instance has to allow its JSON API (json under search.formats in its settings.yml), which most public instances don’t, and public instances also rate-limit anything that isn’t a browser. The keyboard sends the headers a browser would, so an instance’s bot check doesn’t refuse it outright, but a busy public instance can still answer “too many requests” (HTTP 429). One you run yourself, with its limiter off, never does.
• Brave API key: blank by default. Paste a key from api-dashboard.search.brave.com to use your own quota. Leave it blank and the app falls back to a key baked into the build, if this build ships one. The field saves as you type, with no separate save button. Under it you’ll read “The app uses your key”, “This field is blank. The app uses the key that is built into the app.”, or “From api-dashboard.search.brave.com, with a free monthly credit”, depending on which applies.
• Tavily API key: blank by default, in its own Tavily group under the Brave one. No build ships a Tavily key, so this is the only way to use it. Paste one and both tools search Tavily instead of Brave. Under it you’ll read “The app uses your key” or “From app.tavily.com, with 1,000 free credits a month”. On the F-Droid build a SearXNG instance still comes first.
• SafeSearch: on by default. It filters explicit results. Web search maps it to Brave’s “moderate” filter. Image search only offers strict or off, so the same toggle maps to “strict” there. Tavily has one level, on or off.
• Results for each search: a slider from 1 to 20, defaulting to 8. (“Each search uses one API request either way,” the app notes.) 20 is the most the Brave and Tavily APIs give for one request.
• Show the answer from the search engine: web search only, on by default. Shows the box described above when the engine sends an answer. On Tavily the answer costs no extra credits.
• Open results in the browser: web search only, off by default. A tap on a result opens it in your browser, and the button beside it inserts the link.
• Advanced search: in the Tavily group, off by default. Tavily’s deeper search, which picks the parts of each page that match your query more closely, for 2 credits a search instead of 1.
• Results per row: image search only, and 3 by default. How many image results sit side by side, from 2 to 5. Fewer columns means bigger previews, which is easier to judge before you send one.

The settings page’s own caption: “Web and image search share everything here. They search the whole web. The Brave plan includes a free monthly credit of about a thousand searches. Brave asks for attribution, so the panel shows ‘via Brave’.” That attribution is a small “via Brave” label inside the search bar, at its right end (just before the ✕ when there’s a search to clear). It reads “via Tavily” while Tavily answers, and a SearXNG instance, being your own server, gets no label.

Searching with Tavily

Tavily is a search API built for AI tools, and it works as a third backend for both tools. Sign up at app.tavily.com for a key. The free plan gives 1,000 credits a month, and each search the keyboard makes uses one: it asks for Tavily’s basic search unless you turn on Advanced search, which uses two. The answer Tavily writes for the query is free, and shows above the results while Show the answer from the search engine is on.

• Web search looks the same as with Brave: a title, the site, and a snippet. The snippet is the passages Tavily picked from the page, joined with ”…”.
• Image search has no image index of its own behind it. Tavily sends back the pictures it found on the pages of its results, so a search usually finds fewer pictures than Brave, with no title under them. Tapping and long-pressing work as they do with Brave.
• With both a Brave key and a Tavily key set, Tavily answers. Clear the Tavily field to go back to Brave.
• When your credits run out, or the key is wrong, the panel shows Tavily’s own message for it.

Reading Wikipedia

Open Wikipedia from the toolbar, or the toolbox if you haven’t pinned it. It isn’t pinned by default either. Unlike the other three tools on this page, Wikipedia has no leader-key letter of its own out of the box. From a hardware keyboard the toolbox shortcut is the way in: double-tap Ctrl, then press T. You can also rebind a letter to it yourself. The panel takes the whole keyboard, the toolbar row included, with a back button and the search bar in its header. While you type a search it shrinks to that header so the keys fit underneath. Results list article titles with short descriptions, and tapping one opens the article.

An open Wikipedia article, with its Summary, Links and Full article tabs.

An open article has three tabs:

• Summary: the article’s short description plus its extract, with Insert summary, Insert link, and Insert title chips.
• Links: the article’s outgoing links, namespace 0 only, so no Talk: or File: noise. The list is capped by Links per article in the tool’s options: 50 to 500, defaulting to 200. 500 is as many as Wikipedia returns at once. The tab loads the first time you open it, and each link gets its own Insert chip.
• Full article: the complete plain-text extract, split into paragraphs. Tap any paragraph to insert just that paragraph. Also loaded on first visit rather than up front.

Two buttons beside the article’s title are for reading it in more room. The expand button grows the panel up the screen, to as much as 80% of its height, and tapping it again brings it back to the keyboard’s height; search results always stay at the normal height. The other opens the article’s page on wikipedia.org in your browser.

Under the title, next to the tabs, Copy copies the article’s text (the full article once you’ve opened that tab, otherwise the summary) with its address after it.

Once you’ve opened an article from a results list, a back arrow appears and returns you to those results instead of a blank search. The idle screen puts it simply, with en swapped for whichever language you’ve set below: “Search for a subject on en.wikipedia.org. Read the summary, open the links, and insert text or the address of the article.”

Asking the AI about an article

With the AI tool on, an Ask AI chip sits next to the tabs, beside Copy. It opens the AI panel’s chat on a new conversation with the article attached: the full article when you’ve opened that tab, otherwise the summary, along with its title, description and address. The keys come up under the message box so you can type your question straight away, or pick Explain simply, Summarise or Hard words to start one for you. Nothing is sent until you send it.

To ask about one part, long-press a word in the summary or in a paragraph of the full article. The word is selected, with a handle at each end to drag it wider, and a bar over it offers Ask AI, Copy, Insert, Quote and Select all. Ask AI sends the passage along with the paragraph it came from, so the model reads it in context. Quote inserts the passage in quotation marks followed by the article it came from: "…" (from [Wikipedia: Cat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat)) when Markdown links is on in the tool’s options, "…" (Wikipedia: Cat, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat) when it’s off. Tap anywhere else to let the selection go. A selection stays inside one paragraph. Copy and Quote work without the AI tool.

Options

WM Keyboard › Tools › Wikipedia

• Turn on: already on.
• Icon colour: only shown if colorful tool icons are on globally.
• Wikipedia language: a free-text subdomain code (en, bn, de, fr, es…), defaulting to en. It changes which language’s Wikipedia every request in the tool reads from. Search, summaries, links, and the full article all follow it.
• Markdown links: off by default. Turn it on to insert links as [Title](url) instead of a bare URL, in both the Summary tab’s “Insert link” chip and every Links-tab chip.
• Links per article: how many outgoing links the Links tab lists, from 50 to 500 and defaulting to 200. A long article can have hundreds, and anything past your number is cut.

The settings page’s caption: “The searches and the article text come from the free APIs of wikipedia.org, only while you use the tool.” No API key is needed anywhere in this tool. It calls Wikipedia’s free public REST and MediaWiki APIs directly.

Looking up definitions

The dictionary looks up English words in a chain of sources you put in order (see Dictionary sources below). None of them needs a key or an account. Open Dictionary with auto-lookup on, which is the default (see Options below), and it immediately looks up your current selection, or the word touching the cursor if nothing is selected.

A dictionary entry, showing serif headword, pronunciation audio, numbered definitions and synonym chips.

• Auto-lookup only picks up Latin-script words. A word holding any character outside that range, Bengali script for instance, is skipped quietly rather than looked up and shown “not found.” The word also has to be 40 characters or fewer and hold at least one letter. Surrounding quotes and hyphens are trimmed off first.
• If there’s nothing to look up and no earlier result is still on screen, the tool drops straight into its own search field instead.
• Headwords render in a serif display font (Lora), distinct from the rest of the keyboard’s typography, falling back to the system serif if the font hasn’t downloaded yet.
• Each entry shows the word and, when the source has them, its IPA phonetic transcription and a pronunciation-audio play button. The Wiktionary definitions source carries neither. An Insert chip types the headword itself at the cursor, not a definition.
• When an installed vocabulary pack has the word and a translation for it, a line under the headword gives its meaning in your language: the one you picked under Translation languages, or else your keyboard’s. It needs the Vocabulary tool on and translations shown in the keyboard under its Card sections; a word outside the packs has no such line.
• Each meaning lists its part of speech, numbered definitions with optional italic example sentences, and up to 12 tappable synonym/antonym chips per row. Tapping a chip looks that word up in turn.
• A line under the last entry names the source that answered, for example “From Wiktionary”.
• A Copy chip beside the search bar copies everything the look-up found as text. With the AI tool on, an Ask AI chip beside it opens a chat about the same text, and a long press on a definition or an example selects it, with Ask AI, Copy and Insert on a bar over it. See Asking the AI about an article, which works the same way.
• “The app cannot reach the dictionary” means no source could be reached: you’re offline, or every online source you left on is down. A word that every reachable source answered for, without an entry, shows “No entry for” instead.

Dictionary sources

The tool asks the first source that is on. When that source doesn’t know the word, or can’t be reached, it asks the next one, so one service being down doesn’t stop the tool. The default order, all on:

1. Vocabulary packs: the vocabulary packs you downloaded, read on the device. Only knows the packs’ words, but sends nothing and works offline.
2. Wiktionary: Wiktionary’s full entry through kaikki.org, with definitions, examples, IPA and recordings.
3. Wiktionary definitions: Wiktionary’s own definition endpoint on wiktionary.org. Definitions and examples only, but small and fast.
4. Free Dictionary API: dictionaryapi.dev. Last because it’s often down for days at a time; while it’s down, every look-up waits about 8 seconds on it before giving up.

Drag a source to change the order, and switch one off to never ask it. With every source off, the panel says so rather than looking anything up. Before version 0.5.12 the Free Dictionary API was the only source, so an outage there broke the tool on every device.

Options

WM Keyboard › Tools › Dictionary

• Turn on: already on.
• Icon colour: only shown if colorful tool icons are on globally.
• Look up the word at the cursor: on by default. Its description on the settings screen reads “The tool searches the selected word or the current word when it opens”. Turn it off and Dictionary always opens on its own empty search field.
• Dictionary sources: a drag list with a switch per source. See Dictionary sources above.
• Servers (F-Droid build only): the addresses of kaikki.org, Wiktionary and the Free Dictionary API, for a mirror or a copy you host yourself.

The settings page’s caption: “Definitions come from the sources below, in their order. The keyboard sends the word that you look up to an online source only when you use the tool.” Power saving’s “Background network” toggle overrides this row. While that toggle is on, auto-lookup is forced off whatever you’ve set here. A look-up nobody explicitly asked for is exactly what it exists to stop.

Details & edge cases

• Only two of the four need to be unlocked. Web search and image search need a Brave key, yours or the one baked into this build, or a Tavily key of your own. On the F-Droid build, a SearXNG instance address unlocks them too. Wikipedia and Dictionary work out of the box against free, keyless public APIs.
• Default hardware letters: W for web search, I for image search, D for dictionary. Wikipedia has no letter of its own out of the box, so reach it through the toolbox (T), or rebind a letter to it yourself.
• Discoverable by typing. Typing “search”, “images”, “wiki”/“wikipedia”, or “define”/“dict” as the last word before your cursor offers a smart chip that opens the matching tool. The keyword list is editable per tool, and only shows while that tool is enabled.
• None of these four are edition-gated. Full and lite behave identically across all four tools here.
• Attribution. Brave Search and Tavily results, Wikipedia’s article text, Wiktionary’s entries, and the Free Dictionary API’s definitions are all credited under “Online services” on the app’s About → Open-source licences screen, alongside the terms each service is used under. Wikipedia’s and Wiktionary’s text is CC BY-SA, which keeps its own license independent of the app’s.

The AI tool can run searches of its own through this same backend, when you let it: it writes the query, reads the results and answers from them, and each one counts against your quota like a search you ran yourself.

For what leaves your device and when, across every network tool, see network policy. For the GIF and sticker tools’ different, search-as-you-type behavior, see GIFs.