| name | research-report |
| description | Research a topic on the open web and write a cited Markdown report. Use when the user asks for a report, a literature scan, a competitive landscape, or a "what's the current state of X" answer that needs sources. |
| license | MIT |
| version | 1.0.0 |
| metadata | {"gaia":{"security_tier":"community","permissions":["network:read"],"tools_required":["search_web","fetch_page","write_file","index_document","query_documents"],"provenance":{"source":"starter-pack"}}} |
Research Report
Turn one broad question into a sourced Markdown report. The value is in the
decomposition — a single search rarely answers a real research question.
Procedure
- Decompose. Restate the topic as 3–5 sub-questions that together answer it.
Show them to the user before searching so they can redirect you early.
- Search each sub-question with
search_web(query, num_results=5). Use a
different phrasing per sub-question; do not reuse the user's wording verbatim
for all of them.
- Read the best sources. For the 2–3 most promising results per
sub-question, call
fetch_page(url) to get the actual text. Never cite a page
you only saw as a search snippet.
- Write the report with this shape:
- One-paragraph answer to the original question, up front.
- One section per sub-question.
- Every non-obvious claim followed by an inline
[source](url) link.
- A "What I could not confirm" section — say so when the web disagreed or
went quiet. An honest gap beats a confident guess.
- Deliver as Markdown in the reply.
When the answer must outlive the session
If the user wants to keep querying the material later, save each fetched page
with write_file(file_path, content) and index_document(file_path) it. After
that query_documents answers follow-ups from the indexed corpus instead of
re-fetching the web.
Notes
search_web uses DuckDuckGo. It is rate-limited and occasionally returns
nothing; if a query comes back empty, rephrase once, then say so rather than
inventing results.- Prefer primary sources (documentation, filings, the project's own site) over
aggregators.
Fork this
Point it at a domain and it becomes a specialist: change the sub-question
template in step 1 to your field's standard questions (for a competitor scan:
pricing, positioning, recent launches, public complaints), and pin step 2 to the
sites you trust.
