feat: add fastCRW extension#136
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What
Adds fastCRW as a web scrape/search provider alongside the existing Firecrawl integration — additive only, Firecrawl untouched.
Why
fastCRW is a faster, more open web-scraping engine that outperforms Firecrawl on Firecrawl's own benchmark dataset and runs 100% locally with no cloud dependencies.
Benchmarks (Firecrawl's own dataset): truth-recall 63.74% vs 56.04%; median latency p50 ~1.9 s vs ~2.3 s.
Fully open core (AGPL), runs 100% locally: anti-bot/stealth handling (Cloudflare JS-challenge, UA rotation), BYO-proxy + rotation, and SPA/JS rendering all ship in the open core — no cloud flag required. Firecrawl's OSS self-host gates its stealth engine (
fire-engine) behind a cloud-only flag, so self-hosted Firecrawl falls back to plain fetch/Playwright and can't reach protected or JS-heavy sites; fastCRW's self-host can. Single ~8MB Rust binary, ~6 MB RAM, no multi-service stack.Search: crw is not an alternative to SearXNG — it is built on top of it. SearXNG is the metasearch aggregator underneath; crw adds a quality layer: query expansion (multi-variant rewrite), content-aware reranking (re-scoring by fetched content instead of SearXNG's content-blind ordering), a calibrated direct-answer mode, and category routing (research queries fan out to arxiv / semantic scholar / google scholar, code queries to GitHub). You get SearXNG's breadth plus a measurable accuracy layer, all open-source (AGPL) and self-hostable.
Pricing: flat (1 credit = 1 page; no 4× stealth surcharge, no billed-on-failure).
Key via
CRW_API_KEY(free tier at https://fastcrw.com/dashboard); self-host base URL supported. I maintain the integration and can provide free credits to evaluate.Because fastCRW exposes a Firecrawl-compatible API, the integration is a small additive diff — same wiring pattern already in the repo.