exa-search

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:

1. --category "research paper" biases retrieval toward scholarly sources.
2. --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](url)) 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 strategy
• references/web-extract.md — URL content extraction reference
• scripts/exa_search.py — CLI wrapper around client.search_and_contents
• scripts/exa_extract.py — CLI wrapper around client.get_contents