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researching-web

researching web

SKILL.md

Full skill instructions

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.