Search does not function, flat-out.
Resolved 💬 2 comments Opened Sep 24, 2025 by vxe4 Closed Oct 21, 2025
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (tibo-openai, collaborator)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
What version of Codex is running?
0.41.0 (latest)
Which model were you using?
gpt-5-codex (high)
What platform is your computer?
6.14.0-29-generic (Ubuntu 25.04)
What steps can reproduce the bug?
Try --search. It didn't work on my other machine, either.
What is the expected behavior?
It should search the web.
What do you see instead?
It literally just can't search the web. It ends up trying to send curl requests to DuckDuckGo and GitHub instead,
Additional information
_No response_
2 Comments
It worked for me cli in my github codespace after i installed via npm, and set in the config. I am using again via the config: model = "gpt-5-codex"
model_reasoning_effort = "medium"
[tools]
web_search = True
However the codex extension... doesn't at all use the websearch tool just curl and wget. I tried new chat same exact message in cli and vscode ide extension. The cli did the search the ide extension did not. Even with additional prompting it didn't.
We made some improvements here, it should be better. In general you might find more success here with GPT-5 for search intensive usecases.