github
Native Web search support.
Describe the feature or problem you'd like to solve
Like Claude Code, Copilot CLI should have the ability to natively determine if a web search is needed and then execute upon it.
Proposed solution
No response
Example prompts or workflows
No response
Additional context
No response
Good idea, thanks.
Since we don't yet have that feature built in, another short-term option is to use an MCP tool. For example https://github.com/damionrashford/RivalSearchMCP provides an endpoint https://github.com/damionrashford/RivalSearchMCP that you can configure as an MCP server - I just checked and it seems to work well.
Totally agree it would be nice for this to be built-in though!
+1 , this is a break or make feature - without web search, copilot is basically stuck at understanding the state of libraries / bugs to walk around / etc from the cutoff time of the training dataset. Without automatic web search copilot feels much "weaker" than for example Claude Code in my experience.
Since we don't yet have that feature built in, another short-term option is to use an MCP tool. For example https://github.com/damionrashford/RivalSearchMCP provides an endpoint https://github.com/damionrashford/RivalSearchMCP that you can configure as an MCP server - I just checked and it seems to work well.
If this takes a bit of time to add in copilot "core", any way that copilot can ship with the MCP built in so this is working out of the box for "less techies" users who dont want to go through MCP setup?
This is on our near term roadmap, no exact dates to share yet but something that is under active investigation.
I am going to need to choose between different Agentic coding CLI tools in the near future for a project and this is a make or break feature because it will depend on actively developed libraries / recent doc that is evolving fast. Any hint of when you expect this may land? If you are not able to provide a hint or it is expected too far in the future, I will unfortunately have to drop using github copilot CLI and use an alternative tool :( . Just saying this to illustrate user needs, as I think this is a typical case that shows up quite often :) .
I recently updated copilot and it looks like it does plenty of web searches now - not sure if this is because of a built in feature, or if it is the model providers doing it, or some other mechanism, but as far as I see, this works in practice for my needs - maybe this issue can be closed :) .
It is quite shocking that the Copilot CLI can't even search GitHub's own issues and PRs. I would suggest to prioritize accessing GitHub's own resources, like what the web chat version can do. This would solve ~80% of the daily challenges that I've encountered so far.
