OpenAI or Claude Web Search

💬 Queries and Resources
1

I'd like to use OpenAI 4o or Claude Sonnet 3.7 to perform web search for up-to-date generation of text (in my case research on news related to customers). I'm doing this within a Workflow.

In both cases, I start my prompt with the recommended:


You are an expert researcher...{rest of prompt}

OpenAI 4o - Managed
Gives me a very quick response of:
Please hold on while I conduct the search for current information on {client_name}. This will just take a moment.
But the workflow doesn't wait around for the rest of the prompt response...

Any suggestions on how I can "make it wait" for the second half of the OpenAI response?

Claude 3.7 - API Key
I have a Teams key configured, and have enabled Web Search (only available March 2025) as ON. But the result back clearly shows data from 2022/2023, and is not up-to-date with expected "news" for a few test clients occurring in early 2025.

Here's a toy example to reproduce the failure:

image
image958×1128 72.7 KB

2

Hi there @Aaron_Patzer, and welcome to the forum!

So, I'm not completely sure about this but as you're using Retool's out of the box AI blocks, I don't think you'll be able to get the data as you're expecting it.

I found this for openAI which should be able to search the web and then provide you with a response (and a list of urls found) .

With regards to Claude, I think that web Search functionality is valid only for the Claude application, and it is not enabled for messages ran in a retool workflow (as this is basically making an API call and it is most likely using the messages endpoint under the hood

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3

Thanks, @MiguelOrtiz!

@Aaron_Patzer, sounds like an interesting workflow :slightly_smiling_face:

Keep an eye on our 📣 Retool Announcements - Retool Forum page, as we have some new features coming soon that I imagine could help with your project :crossed_fingers: (also see Kent's note here: AI Agents in Retool - #9 by kent)

4

This one is still not solved. Ideally, we would be able to define "tools" in Retool AI, just like you can via Python.

Without this, neither OpenAI 4o / 4.1, nor Grok 3, nor Sonnet 3.7 will actually search the web. Instead, you get a "sorry my knowledge cutoff date is March 2023" or similar.

tools = [ { "type": "web_search_preview" }]
response = client. responses. create(
model="gpt-40-mini",
input=input_messages,
tools=tools
)

5

@Aaron_Patzer we will announce our solution to this specific problem (and many other related problems) on May 28 - thanks in advance for your patience!

https://events.retool.com/enterprise-ai?utm_source=website&utm_medium=web_banner

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