Perplexity fast search in Hermes: who gets it, and the old setting that silently blocks it

What changed

• Portal users get it by default. On the Nous Portal route, Hermes' web_search tool now goes through Nous's Tool Gateway to Perplexity. Nous and Perplexity announced this on 2026-09-24; the video quotes Perplexity at a ~160 ms median and 95% of searches under 230 ms.
• Page reading hasn't changed. According to the video, web_extract (full-page reads) stays on Firecrawl. If a managed Perplexity call fails, that one call falls back to another backend.
• Bring-your-own-key still works. The perplexity backend with PERPLEXITY_API_KEY is a documented option. The video cites Perplexity's docs for the minimum version, which the auto-captions render ambiguously ("0.2, 1.1"). Update to the current release rather than relying on that number.
• Only search changes, not the model. Your reasoning model stays whatever you picked.

The setting that blocks it — confirmed in the docs

The Hermes docs are explicit: "The runtime always uses the stored web.backend selection (set via hermes tools; nous routes through the managed Tool Gateway)." Auto-detection only happens if you've never picked a backend. So if you set firecrawl, tavily or exa in the past, you are still on it.

# update first — the change landed 2026-09-24
hermes update

# then pick the Nous-managed web search row
hermes tools

Or check ~/.hermes/config.yaml directly:

web:
  backend: nous          # managed Tool Gateway route
  # search_backend / extract_backend override per capability — remove old ones

The docs also list per-capability keys (web.search_backend, web.extract_backend). An old search_backend line overrides the main backend for searches, so remove it too. Source: Hermes configuration → Web Search Backends.

Tips from the video worth keeping

• Check who served the search. The video cites an open GitHub report (2026-09-25) from a Portal user whose searches were quietly falling back to another backend while still reporting success. The tool result names the backend. If it doesn't say Perplexity, you aren't on fast search.
• Match the search to the job. Perplexity recommends fast search for everyday agent lookups and its default search for hard, long-tail research. Fast search scored slightly lower on rare questions in its internal tests.
• Finding isn't verifying. Ask the agent for the search result and the exact line from the page it used.
• Watch what reaches memory. Hermes memory persists, so a bad source saved once gets reused. Keep the source attached to saved facts (see Hermes memory).

The last half of the video promotes a paid community; this page covers only the technical content.