| name | researching-web |
| description | Search the web using Perplexity AI. Use when needing to search, look up, research, find current information, best practices, compare technologies, or answer factual questions about tools and libraries. |
| allowed-tools | Read, Grep, Glob, mcp__perplexity-ask__perplexity_ask |
Web Research with Perplexity
Use mcp__perplexity-ask__perplexity_ask for web search.
When to Use
- Best practices and recommendations
- Current information (releases, news)
- Comparisons between technologies
- Factual questions about tools/libraries
Usage
{
"messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Your research question" }]
}
Tips
- Be specific: "Go error handling best practices 2024"
- Include context: "Redis vs Memcached for session storage"
- Ask comparisons: "Pros and cons of gRPC vs REST"
Gotchas
- Search quality varies by phrasing — "X best practices" returns curated guides; "X mistakes" returns blog rants. Same intent, very different results.
- Multi-source synthesis doesn't auto-detect contradictions — facts from sources A and B may directly contradict; the skill doesn't flag this.
- Date filtering ("last year") is unreliable — search engines may include cached older content that was indexed recently.
- Rate limits on the underlying search API silently truncate results — a "no results" finding may actually be a quota issue.
- Geo-targeting: same query from different IPs returns different results — VPN switches mid-research produce inconsistent corpus.
- NOT FOR official API/library reference — for those use
looking-up-docs (Context7); this skill is for trends, comparisons, news.
