Search, Wikipedia & dictionary

This page covers four separate tools, each with its own panel and its own settings screen: Web search and Image search (both backed by Brave), 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 goes anywhere until you tap a result. Dictionary is the one exception: with its auto-lookup setting on (the default), opening the tool reads your current selection or the word at the cursor to look itself up (see Looking up definitions below).

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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 are powered by the Brave Search API. 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), but unlike GIFs and stickers, neither search runs live as you type: both wait for you to press the search/enter action before firing a request.

• 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: two distinct actions, not one. Each row shows the title, host, and an HTML-stripped snippet.
• Image search — tap a thumbnail to download the full image and insert it directly, the same commitContent path the clipboard and GIF tools use, or 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.

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

Without a usable key, neither tool appears on the keyboard at all. There’s no button to tap that opens a panel with nothing behind it: with no key, 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 “Needs an API key. Press this row to add one.” in place of the usual description. Paste a key on that screen and both come straight back.

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

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), but they share one identical settings block:

• Enabled — on by default, like every tool. Turning it off removes that tool from both the toolbar and the toolbox. The switch can’t be pressed while there’s no key: with nothing to search with, there’s nothing to turn on.
• Icon colour — only shown if colorful tool icons are turned on globally.
• 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 (no separate save button), and its supporting text reads “Using your key”, “Blank — using the key built into this app”, or the hint text, depending on which applies.
• SafeSearch — on by default. Filters explicit results; web search maps this to Brave’s “moderate” filter, while image search only offers strict/off, so the same toggle maps to “strict” there instead.
• Results per search — a slider from 1 to 10, defaulting to 8. (“Each search uses one API request either way,” the app notes.) The Brave API itself allows up to 20 results per request; the app’s slider caps out lower, at 10.

The settings page’s own caption: “Web and image search share everything here. Searches the whole web. Brave’s plan includes a monthly free credit (roughly a thousand searches) and asks for attribution — the panel shows ‘via Brave’.” That attribution shows up as a small “via Brave” label next to the search bar whenever a usable key exists.

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, so from a hardware keyboard the toolbox shortcut (double-tap Ctrl, then T) is the way in, unless you rebind a letter to it yourself. Search in the panel’s header bar; results list article titles with short descriptions, and tapping one opens the article.

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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:/File: noise), capped at 200 by the app even though the underlying API allows up to 500. Loaded the first time you open the tab; 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.

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 any topic on en.wikipedia.org — read the summary, follow links, insert text or the article’s URL.”

Options

WM Keyboard›Tools›Wikipedia

• Enabled — on by default.
• 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. This 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.

The settings page’s caption: “Searches and article text come from wikipedia.org’s free APIs — 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 with the Free Dictionary API (dictionaryapi.dev): no key, no account. Open Dictionary and, if auto-lookup is on (the default; see Options below), it immediately looks up your current selection, or the word touching the cursor if nothing is selected.

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

• Auto-lookup only picks up Latin-script words. A word containing any character outside that range (Bengali, for instance) is silently skipped rather than looked up and shown “not found.” The word also has to be 40 characters or fewer and contain 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), deliberately 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, its IPA phonetic transcription when the API has one, a pronunciation-audio play button when a recording exists, and an Insert chip that types the headword itself (not a definition) at the cursor.
• 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.

Options

WM Keyboard›Tools›Dictionary

• Enabled — on by default.
• 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: “Opening the tool searches the selected or current word.” Turn it off and opening Dictionary always starts at its own empty search field.

The settings page’s caption: “Definitions come from the Free Dictionary API (dictionaryapi.dev). The word you look up is sent to that service — only when you use the tool.” Power saving’s “Background network” toggle overrides this one: while it’s on, auto-lookup is forced off no matter what you’ve set here, since a look-up nobody explicitly asked for is exactly what that toggle exists to stop.

Details & edge cases

• Only two of the four need a key. Web search and image search need a Brave key (yours, or the one baked into this build) before they show up anywhere. 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 results, Wikipedia’s article text (CC BY-SA, which keeps its own license independent of the app’s), 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.

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.