@web doesn't work. (neither does @codebase really) I am a paying customer and Claude just tells me he can't access the internet

This is frustrating as ■■■■. I almost though I had found the holy grail here but keep hitting walls and now this. Two days ago, this was working fine. Now it isn’t. Since then, I have done a reinstall because for some reason, when I tried to run cursor with elevated privileges, the entire application was removed from my machine. I am using this solely as a second brain kind of AI to process an obsidian vault where I have 10-20 folders and 40-50 files right now. The struggle I have is that cursor constantly does not seem to be able to handle looking at all those files at the same time and understanding them all. Fine I accept that now, I will just have to accept that the @codebase command isn’t really as expansive as it suggests it is. (if you are wondering, I was trying to run the application as an admin to see if elevated privileges would allow cursor to actually see the directory structure and files because I couldn’t even get Claude to do that with any reliability).

Anyway, after the reinstall, i wanted to clean house, I didn’t need any of the extensions from my visual studio install so I began removing those and I also went through the settings trying to optimize the system for maximum data retention. However, after doing all this i found that the @web function no longer was something that Claude could do. This is literally one of the selling points of the product that I am paying for and there is not documentation on what extensions or settings must be set for it to function, there are only salesman pitches on what it does and vague descriptions on how it does its magic. This is useless for someone who encounters a problem. Why aren’t there more technical specifications for these features and how they function?

I have checked the forum and see multiple people reporting this issue with no real guidance on how to resolve it, with others responding that, hey, they’re not having the issue, maybe try again…

Here’s what happens when i use the command:

I even showed it an image from the forum of a user using the cursor interface showing it that it does support the web which it then used to lie to me with: (I’d include the image, but you guys won’t let me)

I called it out on this and it admitted it and also told me it couldn’t tell me what it was being asked to do when I used the @web command: (Again, I’d include the image, but you guys won’t let me)

So that’s my very frustrated story. I am still using cursor but I am upset about how terrible it is and as soon as I find a better option that handles lots of files and lets me reach out to the web, I’d jump ship because of the issues above.

My OS is Windows 10 Enterprise Version 22H2
Cursor version data is below:

Version: 0.45.9
VSCode Version: 1.96.2
Commit: cce0110ca40ceb61e76ecea08d24210123895320
Date: 2025-02-02T06:44:49.761Z
Electron: 32.2.6
Chromium: 128.0.6613.186
Node.js: 20.18.1
V8: 12.8.374.38-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.19045

So I will answer my own problem since no one else is. I found out what you need to ensure that when you are using the @web command it is highlighting it appropriately in your chat window. Even then I had to coax the AI back into believing it had links that it could view and access. See below for what I am talking about and not the difference in the @web in this image vs the ones in my original post. I had to click on the @web in my dialog box. to get it to do that. I often was hitting esc because when i would type @web in my chat window and then kept typing the chat window would end up replacing my @web with a file that I had in my repo which was really annoying. I am still on the lookout for a better product because I keep having to find ways to make this one fit my use case, so far though this is by far the best out of all the other sub-par options.