Add Octen plugin — web search, multi-query research, and content extraction

[dongxu0413]

What this PR does

Adds the official Octen plugin to the Grok Build Plugin Marketplace. Supersedes #149.

• Plugin name: octen
• Type: remote source
• Source URL + pinned SHA: https://github.com/Octen-Team/octen-grok-plugin.git @ 825363e074f6aa835368ab8358ff6be9fa050f1f
• Homepage: https://octen.ai
• License: MIT

Why another search plugin

The catalog already has good semantic-search and scraping options. Octen is here for a different
axis: latency and retrieval width, which is what a coding agent actually spends its budget on.

• Fast enough to call repeatedly. Octen serves web search at a P50 of 62 ms (measured on SealQA
  Hard) — inside the budget to call search several times within a single agent turn.
• Retrieval quality is measured, not asserted. We score it with a public, re-runnable eval harness:
  SimpleQA and FreshQA through the official graders, plus a blind, position-debiased pairwise judge that
  reports the per-competitor gaps, including where competitors beat us. Octen scores 95.2% on SimpleQA
  and 55.8% on FreshQA there; scores and per-set latency all regenerate from run artifacts:
  https://github.com/Octen-Team/search-eval
• broad_search is a server-side primitive, not a client loop. Give it the user's full question and
  Octen decomposes it into concurrent sub-queries, returning results grouped per sub-query. Every other
  search plugin in this catalog makes the agent plan the fan-out itself, which costs extra turns and
  extra tokens before a single result comes back. One broad_search call replaces a
  plan-then-N-searches round trip.
• Classification on every result. Each extracted page carries a topical category and a
  page_structure typology, so a skill can distinguish docs from forum from product page without a
  second model call.

Tools

Tool	What it does
search	Search the live web for focused, current information and sources.
news_search	Search recent events, announcements, and time-sensitive reporting.
broad_search	Decompose a research question into concurrent sub-queries and return broad, grouped coverage.
extract	Turn known URLs into clean, LLM-ready content with optional highlights and page labels.

The plugin includes the octen-web skill, which picks the smallest tool that fits the
request and preserves returned source URLs.

Credentials

Octen uses a stdio MCP server with an OCTEN_API_KEY read from the user's local environment.
Unlike a hosted MCP server, no request is proxied through a third party — the key and the query go
from the user's machine straight to api.octen.ai.

Sign up at https://octen.ai to get an API key; new accounts start with $5 in free credit.

A hosted MCP server with browser OAuth is on our roadmap.

Ownership

• I own this plugin or have the right to distribute it.
• The source repository is published under our official organization.

The plugin source is maintained at https://github.com/Octen-Team/octen-grok-plugin under the official
Octen-Team organization, licensed MIT. I'm an engineer at Octen.

Checklist

• Added exactly one entry in .grok-plugin/marketplace.json with a unique, kebab-case name.
• Remote source pins a public, reachable, full 40-character lowercase commit SHA.
• Regenerated and committed .grok-plugin/plugin-index.json.
• python3 scripts/validate-catalog.py passes locally.
• python3 scripts/generate-plugin-index.py --check passes locally.
• Homepage, clear description, and Octen-owned domains are set.
• The plugin has a README and a valid plugin manifest.
• License is stated as MIT.

Catalog diff is limited to the single octen entry — no formatting or unrelated changes to other
entries in marketplace.json, and plugin-index.json differs only by the regenerated octen block.

Keywords are brand-scoped so the plugin CTA doesn't fire on generic search or extract requests:

["octen", "octen search", "octen ai"]

Security

• No curl | bash, postinstall hook, remote-binary download/execute, eval, obfuscation, or
  minified payload.
• No lifecycle hooks, agents, shell-execution tools, or filesystem access.
• No telemetry or undisclosed network traffic.
• No reading or exfiltration of .env files, SSH material, tokens, or unrelated environment
  variables.
• MCP scope: one stdio server named octen, exposing exactly the four tools listed above
  (Beta image_search/video_search are disabled via OCTEN_ENABLE_BETA_TOOLS=false).
• Network endpoint: https://api.octen.ai — the only host the plugin contacts.
• Credentials: OCTEN_API_KEY, supplied by the user from their local environment. No key is
  embedded in the repository, the marketplace entry, or the plugin documentation.

Validation

$ python3 scripts/validate-catalog.py
Catalog OK (.grok-plugin/marketplace.json)

$ python3 scripts/generate-plugin-index.py --check
Plugin index OK (.grok-plugin/plugin-index.json)

$ git ls-remote https://github.com/Octen-Team/octen-grok-plugin.git HEAD refs/heads/main
825363e074f6aa835368ab8358ff6be9fa050f1f	HEAD
825363e074f6aa835368ab8358ff6be9fa050f1f	refs/heads/main

Notes for reviewers

Verified against the pinned build (825363e): the plugin's MCP command —
npx -y octen-mcp@0.3.6 with OCTEN_ENABLE_BETA_TOOLS=false — completes the MCP initialize
handshake and lists exactly the four tools above; no Beta tool is exposed. Catalog and index
validators pass locally (see Validation).

To verify against this PR directly, point xAI Official at the merge ref in ~/.grok/config.toml:

branch = "refs/pull/150/merge"

then refresh /marketplaces and confirm the octen MCP server and the octen-web skill
appear and resolve. Happy to rebase or adjust keywords and description on request.

cc @ykeremy

[dongxu0413]

Hi @ykeremy — requesting review when you have a moment.

This adds the official octen plugin under our Octen-Team org (MIT), structured the same as the merged Tavily (#106) and Firecrawl (#30) entries: one remote-source catalog entry pinned to a full 40-char commit SHA, a regenerated plugin-index.json, and a single stdio MCP server exposing exactly four GA tools (search, news_search, broad_search, extract).

• python3 scripts/validate-catalog.py and python3 scripts/generate-plugin-index.py --check both pass locally.
• Catalog diff is limited to the single octen entry — no unrelated formatting changes.
• Keywords are brand-scoped (octen, octen search, octen ai) so the CTA doesn't fire on generic search/extract.
• Supersedes feat: add Octen Grok Build plugin #149.

Happy to rebase or adjust keywords/description on request. Thanks!