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System prompt not taken into account when web browsing. #1159
Description
I have not inspected the code but this is why I suspect this.
I created an assistant that should be explicitly searching for "University of Florida":
https://hf.co/chat/assistant/664e60ae000c01b5d327de43
And when I ask for help on a college related topic I get this:
None of the URLs were related to "University of Florida".
I tried it several times with similar prompts and nothing.
This works in OpenAI's GPTs store
Activity
nsarrazin commentedon May 27, 2024
Hey, so we indeed do not take the system prompt into account for generating the websearch query. I guess it would make sense to have it when generating the prompt as well.
neven4 commentedon Jun 14, 2024
Hi there, @nsarrazin how do you want to approach this: by adding 'System instruction' to a web search query, or by asking a model to create a web search query from a user query and a 'System instruction'?
neven4 commentedon Jun 20, 2024
Hi @nsarrazin, WDYT?
nuthalapativarun commentedon Jun 26, 2026
Since this was filed, web search has been refactored to go through MCP tool calls rather than a standalone module. In the current flow,
conv.prepromptis passed asprepromptintorunMcpFlow(seesrc/lib/server/textGeneration/index.tsL51–54), which merges it with the tool-use preprompt and injects it as the system message before the first completion call (runMcpFlow.tsL353–369). So the assistant's system prompt is technically present when the model decides what to search for — the remaining question is whether the model actually honors it when generating search queries. Can anyone confirm whether this is still reproducible against the current MCP-backed search? Happy to dig into the search query construction path if so.