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NLWeb /ask

EvalGate exposes a public NLWeb 0.55 /ask endpoint for agents that need to find published documentation. It performs bounded deterministic search over EvalGate’s published documentation catalog. It does not call a model, read repositories, access customer data, or summarize private content. No account or API key is needed for this public documentation catalog:
The endpoint also accepts the modern POST shape:
The legacy POST shape { "query": "How do I connect MCP?", "streaming": true } remains accepted. GET uses query, q, or text as the query parameter. Results are list/search results only; summarize and generate modes return a truthful unsupported-mode error.

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JSON response

Non-streaming requests return query_id, the normalized query, a deterministic results list, and NLWeb metadata:

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Streaming response

Set prefer.streaming to true (or use the legacy streaming field) to receive text/event-stream. Events are emitted in this order:
  1. start — includes answer metadata with version: "0.55" and streaming: true.
  2. result — includes the result index and a typed item for each matching document.
  3. error — includes failure metadata and an error code when no documents match.
  4. complete — includes final metadata and the result count.
Set prefer.mode to list and prefer.response_format to conversational_search. Unsupported modes/formats return explicit errors; an explicit prefer.streaming: false takes precedence over the legacy field. Results contain only published documentation. NO_RESULTS is a failure envelope, and a stream still ends with complete after its error event. The legacy request fields remain accepted; response metadata and indexed events now use NLWeb 0.55. Requests share the anonymous quota of 100 requests per hour. Read RateLimit and RateLimit-Policy on each response and respect Retry-After on 429. Queries are limited to 200 characters, POST bodies to 64,000 bytes, and results to ten public documents. No model provider or customer API is invoked. Authentication is optional. If you send credentials, they must be valid and include docs:read; invalid credentials receive 401, and a key without that scope receives 403. The WWW-Authenticate challenge points to EvalGate’s protected-resource metadata. Supplying invalid credentials never silently falls back to anonymous access.