| name | exa-search |
| description | 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. |
| compatibility | Requires exa-py Python SDK, an EXA_API_KEY, and internet access. |
| license | MIT |
| metadata | {"skill-author":"Exa","website":"https://exa.ai","docs":"https://exa.ai/docs"} |
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:
--category "research paper" biases retrieval toward scholarly sources.--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:
uv run --with exa-py python "$SKILL_PATH/scripts/exa_search.py" --help
If you prefer a persistent install:
uv pip install "exa-py>=1.14.0"
Authentication
All commands read the API key from the EXA_API_KEY environment variable. Get your Exa API key at dashboard.exa.ai/api-keys.
First, check if a .env file exists in the project root and contains EXA_API_KEY. If so, load it:
dotenv -f .env run -- uv run --with exa-py python "$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:
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.
Tracking header
Every script in this skill sets the x-exa-integration request header to k-dense-ai--scientific-agent-skills so Exa can attribute usage from the K-Dense AI scientific-agent-skills repo to this integration. Do not remove or rename this header when adapting the scripts.
Files in this skill
SKILL.md — this file (routing and setup)references/web-search.md — detailed web search reference with academic strategyreferences/web-extract.md — URL content extraction referencescripts/exa_search.py — CLI wrapper around client.search_and_contentsscripts/exa_extract.py — CLI wrapper around client.get_contents
