research-report

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.