| name | parallel-web-tools |
| description | This skill should be used when users want a Firecrawl-like capability for web discovery and clean markdown extraction using Parallel Search and Parallel Extract (including objective-led excerpts and full content). |
| license | Complete terms in LICENSE.txt |
parallel-web-tools
Purpose
Provide a repeatable workflow to:
- discover relevant URLs with Parallel Search
- extract clean markdown from URLs (including JS-heavy pages and PDFs) with Parallel Extract
- return objective-focused excerpts or full content depending on task
When to use
Use when asked to:
- search the web for relevant sources with an explicit objective
- extract clean markdown from one or many URLs
- do “scrape this page” but want objective-focused excerpts, not raw HTML
What this skill is not
- Not a live browser probe for computed styles or hover/focus diffs.
- For “CSS etc”, use a browser-probe lane (agent-browser / Playwright) alongside Parallel.
Required setup
- Set environment variable
PARALLEL_API_KEY.
- Base URL:
https://api.parallel.ai
- Headers:
x-api-key: <key>parallel-beta: search-extract-2025-10-10
Workflow
1) Decide search vs extract
- Use Search when URLs are unknown.
- Use Extract when URLs are known.
2) Search
- Provide objective and/or search_queries
- mode: one-shot | agentic | fast
- Capture url, title, publish_date (if present), excerpts
3) Extract
- Provide urls list
- objective optional (recommended)
- excerpts=true for objective-aligned snippets
- full_content=true for full markdown
4) Error handling
- Retry failures up to 2 times with backoff.
- Batch requests if rate limits appear.
Output shape recommendation
- run_metadata
- search_results (if used)
- extract_results (if used)
- errors/warnings
Use scripts/parallel_search_extract.py for a ready-to-run CLI.
