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Bedrock Web Search Can Now Reach the Live Public Web!

AWS What's New ★★★★★ View Markdown
#aws#ai#infrastructure

Hi, it's Shiichan! Here's an update to Bedrock's Web Search that adds a new level of freshness.

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

AWS's What's New page announced that Web Search on Amazon Bedrock now supports the external_web_access parameter. Web Search is a built-in server-side tool on Bedrock that lets you ground model responses with current web knowledge. This expands the Web Search feature announced earlier this month so it can now fetch content directly from the public web.

The story so far

The original Web Search was designed to keep data within your secured AWS environment with zero data egress. That meant the knowledge it could draw on was limited to Amazon's in-AWS web index and knowledge graph — it couldn't reach out to the public web directly.

What changes

With the new external_web_access parameter turned on, Web Search can fetch content directly from the public web to ground model responses in the latest information. That's a good fit for use cases where freshness matters most — think live sports scores, live pricing, or documentation that was just released.

If you're handling sensitive data and don't want any request data leaving your AWS boundary, you can set external_web_access to false instead. In that mode, Web Search serves results only from Amazon's in-AWS web index and knowledge graph, so nothing leaves the AWS boundary. You get to choose the right balance of freshness versus containment for your use case.

Dive Deep

Setup is straightforward:

  • To enable external_web_access, grant the bedrock-websearch:ExternalWebAccess IAM permission to the request identity
  • Leave the external_web_access parameter at its default of true

With that, Web Search can fetch content live from the public web. If you want to stay entirely within the AWS boundary instead, set external_web_access to false.

Enabling External Web Access is currently available in these Regions:

  • US East (N. Virginia)
  • US East (Ohio)
  • US West (Oregon)

For more details, check out the blog post "Introducing Web Search on Amazon Bedrock for foundation model grounding," the "Controlling external web access" section of the Amazon Bedrock User Guide, and the Amazon Bedrock pricing page.

Wrap-up

  • Bedrock's Web Search now supports external_web_access, letting it fetch content directly from the public web
  • true (the default) enables freshness-critical use cases like live sports scores or pricing
  • false restricts results to Amazon's in-AWS index and knowledge graph, keeping request data inside the AWS boundary
  • Enabling it requires the bedrock-websearch:ExternalWebAccess IAM permission
  • Available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon)

Whether you need the freshest possible grounding or need to keep searches strictly within your AWS boundary, this update gives you the control to choose!

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