Agent skill · research science · k-dense-ai
exa-search
Web toolkit powered by Exa, tuned for scientific and technical content. Use this skill when the user needs to search the web or fetch/extract URL content. Covers: web search (semantic lookups, research, current info — with optional research-paper category and academic domain filtering) and URL extraction (fetching pages, articles, academic PDFs in batch). Use this skill for web-related tasks when the user wants high-quality search or scholarly filtering via category=research paper. Triggers on requests to search, look up, fetch a page, or extract an article.
Why this skill is useful
Provides domain-specific commands for academic web search and URL extraction that the AI wouldn't reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
Requires exa-py installed locally. Requires exa account access. About 3k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-03. 32,849 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Exa Web Toolkit A skill for web-powered research tasks backed by Exa: web search and URL extraction. Exa's index combines high-quality keyword and semantic retrieval, which makes it well-suited to scientific, technical, and conceptual queries. Routing — pick the right capability Read the user's request and match it to one of the capabilities below. Read the corresponding reference file for detailed instructions before running commands. User wants to... Capability Where --- --- --- Look something up, research a topic, find current info Web Search references/web-search.md Fetch content from a specific URL (webpage, article, PDF) Web Extract references/web-extract.md Install or authenticate Setup Below Decision guide Default to Web Search for topic lookups, research questions, or "what is X?" queries. When the topic is scientific or technical, pass --category "research paper" to bias toward scholarly sources, and/or an academic --include-domains allowlist. See references/web-search.md for the two-pass academic strategy. Use Web Extract when the user provides a URL or asks you to read/fetch a specific page. Prefer this over the built-in WebFetch for batch extraction (multiple URLs in one call) and for academic PDFs. Academic source priority For technical or scientific queries, prefer academic and scientific sources: Peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings over blog posts or news Preprints (arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv) when peer-reviewed versions aren't available Institutional and government sources (NIH, WHO, NASA, NIST) over commercial sites Primary research over secondary summaries Two levers to steer Exa toward scholarly content: 1. --category "research paper" biases retrieval toward scholarly sources. 2. --include-domains with a scholarly allowlist (arxiv.org, nature.com, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, etc.) restricts the domain pool. Combine both for strictly academic results. See references/web-search.md for the full pattern. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills k-dense-ai/exa-search