| name | people-research |
| description | People research using Exa search. Finds experts, professional profiles, and public bios. |
| context | fork |
People Research (Exa)
Use this skill for finding experts, candidates, speakers, authors, investors, founders, maintainers, or other public professional profiles.
Tool Selection
| Intent | Primary Tool | Notes |
|---|
| Professional profile discovery | web_search_advanced_exa with category: "people" | Use when available; put role, domain, company, or location in query. |
| Broad discovery when advanced search is unavailable | web_search_exa | Use precise role/company/topic terms and public-profile keywords. |
| Compare multiple people or build a shortlist | web_research_exa | Use when enabled; include selection criteria in systemPrompt. |
| Direct factual question about one person | web_answer_exa | Good for short cited checks. |
| Read selected profile pages or bios | web_fetch_exa | Fetch only high-signal URLs. |
| Find similar profiles from a strong seed page | web_find_similar_exa | Use when one public profile is an ideal example. |
If web_search_advanced_exa is unavailable, fall back to web_search_exa. If web_research_exa is unavailable, provide a sourced shortlist without deep synthesis.
Filter Restrictions
When using web_search_advanced_exa with category: "people", avoid:
excludeDomains
startPublishedDate / endPublishedDate
For includeDomains, only LinkedIn domains are accepted by the extension for category: "people", such as linkedin.com or www.linkedin.com.
Recommended Settings
- People discovery
{ "query": "distributed systems database engineer San Francisco", "category": "people", "numResults": 10 }
- LinkedIn-scoped people discovery
{ "query": "AI infrastructure startup founder", "category": "people", "includeDomains": ["linkedin.com"], "numResults": 10 }
- Deep shortlist comparison
{ "query": "Find public experts in database internals and distributed systems who write about production engineering trade-offs.", "systemPrompt": "Prefer public bios, personal sites, talks, publications, and reputable profiles. Flag common-name ambiguity and sparse evidence.", "outputSchema": { "type": "object", "properties": { "experts": { "type": "array", "items": { "type": "object" } }, "caveats": { "type": "array", "items": { "type": "string" } } } } }
Output Guidance
- Return one row per person with source URL.
- Include role, company/affiliation, expertise signal, and recency signal.
- Flag uncertainty: common-name collisions, outdated profiles, or sparse evidence.
- Avoid private, sensitive, or unsourced personal claims.