web-research

name	web-research
description	Research topics using the web via curl. Use when the user asks to look something up, find current information, or research a topic online.
metadata	{"shelllm":{"requires":{"bins":["curl","jq"]}}}

web-research

When to use

User asks to look something up, find current information, research a topic, or answer a question that requires up-to-date knowledge beyond what you have in context.

Common operations

Fetch a web page

curl -sL "https://example.com" | head -200

Search via DuckDuckGo (HTML)

query="your search terms"
curl -sL "https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=$(printf '%s' "$query" | jq -sRr @uri)" \
  | grep -oP 'href="https?://[^"]*"' | head -10

Fetch and extract text from HTML

# Strip HTML tags for readable text
curl -sL "$url" | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' | sed '/^$/d' | head -100

Fetch JSON APIs

curl -s "https://api.example.com/endpoint" | jq '.results[]'

Download a file

curl -sLO "https://example.com/file.txt"

Tips

• Always use -s (silent) and -L (follow redirects) with curl
• Pipe HTML through sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' for rough text extraction
• Use head or tail to limit output — full web pages are huge
• For JavaScript-heavy sites, raw curl won't render dynamic content
• Rate-limit requests — don't hammer endpoints in tight loops
• Check robots.txt before scraping extensively