Agent skill · data analytics · jeremylongshore
serpapi-common-errors
Classify SerpAPI HTTP failures, search-status failures, and valid empty results before choosing a retry or repair. Use when searches fail, stall, or return unexpected shapes. Trigger with "diagnose a SerpAPI error".
Why this skill is useful
Provides specific commands and error handling patterns for diagnosing and fixing SerpApi issues that the AI wouldn't reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
Requires curl, jq installed locally. Requires serpapi account access. About 2k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-07. 2,604 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
SerpAPI Error Classification and Recovery Overview Diagnose the transport, account, search, engine, and application layers separately so retries do not hide configuration or quota failures. Prerequisites HTTP status, safe error text, engine, normalized parameters, client version, and timestamp Search ID and searchmetadata.status when a response was created Account owner approval before any live reproduction Tool Discipline Use Read, Glob, and Grep to trace request construction and parsing, WebFetch to verify current error semantics, Write or Edit for fixes and redacted evidence, and Bash(python3:) only for an approved diagnostic using the official client. Current Contract SerpAPI uses conventional statuses: 400 for invalid requests, 401 for invalid authentication, 403 for forbidden accounts, 404 for missing resources, 410 for expired archive searches, 429 for either hourly throughput or exhausted searches, and 500/503 for server failures. Search status can be Queued, Processing, Success, or Error; Success can contain empty results. Authentication Keep SERPAPIKEY out of exceptions and captured request URLs. Use the Account API to classify 429 responses, and share only redacted request metadata or search IDs with support. Instructions 1. Capture the HTTP status, response error, search status, search ID, engine, safe parameter names, and client timeout. 2. Determine whether failure occurred before search creation, during queued/processing work, after a terminal error, or in local parsing. 3. For 400, compare parameters with the selected engine documentation and fix locally without retrying unchanged. 4. For 401/403, stop and repair account access; for 429, query Account API to separate throughput from allowance. 5. Retry timeouts and 500/503 only with a small attempt budget, exponential backoff, jitter, and idempotent processing. 6. Treat terminal Success with empty sections as data, then inspect documented engine-specific state fields. 7. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills jeremylongshore/serpapi-common-errors