exa-search

Original：🇺🇸 English
Translated
3 scripts

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.

1installs
Sourcecrazymsn/academic-skills
Added on

NPX Install

npx skill4agent add crazymsn/academic-skills exa-search

Tags

Translated version includes tags in frontmatter
exa-web-toolkitweb-searchurl-extractionacademic-researchpython-sdk

SKILL.md Content

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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...CapabilityWhere
Look something up, research a topic, find current infoWeb Search
references/web-search.md
Fetch content from a specific URL (webpage, article, PDF)Web Extract
references/web-extract.md
Install or authenticateSetupBelow

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.
When citing academic sources, include author names and publication year where available (e.g., Smith et al., 2025) in addition to the standard citation format. If a DOI is present, prefer the DOI link.

Setup

This skill uses the 
exa-py
 Python SDK. The scripts in 
scripts/
declare their dependencies via PEP 723 inline metadata, so you can run them directly with 
uv run
without a separate install step:
bash
uv run --with exa-py python "$SKILL_PATH/scripts/exa_search.py" --help
If you prefer a persistent install:
bash
uv pip install "exa-py>=1.14.0"

Authentication

All commands read the API key from the 
EXA_API_KEY
environment variable. Get your Exa API key at dashboard.exa.ai/api-keys.
First, check if a 
.env
file exists in the project root and contains 
EXA_API_KEY
. If so, load it:
bash
dotenv -f .env run -- uv run --with exa-py python "$SKILL_PATH/scripts/exa_search.py" "your query"
If 
dotenv
isn't available, install it: 
pip install python-dotenv[cli]
or 
uv pip install python-dotenv[cli]
.
If there's no 
.env
, export the key for the session:
bash
export EXA_API_KEY="your-key"
Verify by running any script with 
--help
— it will exit cleanly if the key is set and auth-check runs only when a real query is made.

Files in this skill

  • SKILL.md
    — this file (routing and setup)
  • references/web-search.md
    — detailed web search reference with academic strategy
  • references/web-extract.md
    — URL content extraction reference
  • scripts/exa_search.py
    — CLI wrapper around 
    client.search_and_contents
  • scripts/exa_extract.py
    — CLI wrapper around 
    client.get_contents