search-tips — independently scanned and version-tracked by SaferSkills.
SaferSkills independently audited search-tips (Agent Skill) and scored it 100/100 (green). The audit ran 55 deterministic rules across Security, Supply Chain, Maintenance, Transparency, and Community; it found 0 high-severity and 0 lower-severity findings. The full rule-by-rule trace and per-finding evidence are below. Free, methodology-open.
Findings & checks · 0 flagged
Every scanned point with the score it earned and what moved between them.
First recorded scan — no prior version to compare against.
The primary manifest — the file an agent reads to learn what this artifact does.
Accumulated guidance for web research using Exa, Firecrawl CLI, and Reddit MCP tools. These are starting points, not rigid rules -- think strategically about each situation and adapt. If a different approach makes more sense for what you're trying to do, go with it. Run npx firecrawl-cli <command> --help to check available options beyond what's documented here. Reference files cover tool-specific deep dives -- see bottom of this file.
Before starting research, load the required MCP tools using ToolSearch:
web_search_advanced_exa and get_code_context_exaget_top_posts, get_post_comments, get_reddit_post, get_subreddit_infoFirecrawl CLI (npx firecrawl-cli) runs via Bash -- no MCP setup needed. Load only what the task requires.
Prefer Exa and Firecrawl over built-in WebSearch/WebFetch.
Research alternates between searching (discovering sources) and fetching (extracting content from them). Find promising leads, read the best ones, refine your understanding, search again.
Finding sources you don't have yet.
web_search_advanced_exa) -- primary tool for web discovery. Naturallanguage queries, add filters as needed (domains, dates, categories).
get_code_context_exa) -- programming topics. Worth trying beforegeneral Exa search for technical/code tasks -- surfaces repos, packages, and docs.
npx firecrawl-cli search) -- Google-powered keyword search.Useful when keyword matching works better than Exa's semantic approach, for site-scoped queries (site:reddit.com {query}), and for content-type filtering (--categories research for academic, --sources news, --tbs qdr:w for time).
Default Exa search pattern: Default to enableHighlights: true and textMaxCharacters: 1. This returns quoted passages from actual page text while preventing the MCP server from flooding context with full text. Use highlightsPerUrl and highlightsNumSentences to control volume if needed.
Extracting content from a source you've identified.
npx firecrawl-cli scrape "<url>" --only-main-content) -- primarytool for reading a known URL. The flag strips nav/sidebars to save tokens.
get_post_comments, get_reddit_post) -- for reading Reddit threads.Firecrawl can't scrape reddit.com directly.
npx firecrawl-cli map "<url>" --search "query") -- discover URLson a site (useful when you need to find the right page, or when scrape returns empty).
The defaults above won't always be right. Some common deviations:
Firecrawl (LinkedIn, Twitter/X, etc.), but Exa often has the full page text in its index. Drop both enableHighlights and textMaxCharacters: 1 to get the complete text. Be aware this can produce large responses.
without the flag. Known to fail on Future plc sites, Blogspot, and GDPR-heavy sites. See Content Extraction below.
The reference files cover more edge cases -- scraping issues, category restrictions, and academic search.
Exa is a neural/semantic search engine. It uses embeddings to understand meaning.
Good: "What do professional reviewers say are the most reliable dishwasher brands in 2025?" Bad: "best dishwasher 2025 reliable"
For broad topics, Exa's additionalQueries parameter can automate this -- it bundles query variations in a single call at no extra cost (see references/exa-tips.md). For manual reformulation, try generating 3-5 query variations:
| Technique | What It Does | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Paraphrase | Same meaning, different words | "RAG failures" -> "problems in RAG systems" |
| Decompose | Break into sub-questions | "Why fail?" -> "Why return irrelevant docs?" |
| Scope shift | Broader context or narrower specifics | "Challenges in production AI search" |
| Perspective shift | Different viewpoints | User vs expert vs critic view |
| Temporal framing | Target different time periods | "Recent 2024-2025" vs "foundational" |
Try includeDomains when the authoritative site for a topic is known -- faster and less noisy than broad search. Try excludeDomains to suppress sites that keep appearing but aren't useful (e.g., exclude youtube.com when video pages crowd out needed editorial content about YouTube creators/content).
Match your research target to the right approach. Reference files have full strategies.
tweet for Twitter; site:reddit.com via Firecrawlsearch + Reddit MCP for discussions. See references/twitter.md, references/reddit.md.
people or company category for discovery, then broaden.See references/people-companies.md.
research paper category; academic APIs for structured data.See references/academic-search.md.
get_code_context_exa for code; gh api for repo data.See references/code-github.md.
news category with date filters; Firecrawl CLIsearch --sources news --tbs qdr:w for Google News with time filtering.
financial report with domain/date filtering.personal site for practitioner opinions,blog posts, and independent analysis. Full parameter support (unlike most specialized categories). See references/personal-sites.md.
Some categories reject certain parameters (400/500 errors). See references/exa-tips.md.
Always use --only-main-content by default -- it strips nav, sidebars, and footers, saving significant tokens. If you get empty or partial results, retry without the flag; it's known to strip article bodies on Future plc sites (iMore, Pocket-lint), GDPR-heavy sites (StorageReview), and Blogspot blogs -- see references/scraping-issues.md.
For even narrower extraction, use --include-tags (e.g., --include-tags "article", --include-tags ".post-content").
When Firecrawl scrape fails (policy blocks, paywalls, SPA rendering), check references/scraping-issues.md for per-site workarounds. General fallback: try Exa full text (drop enableHighlights and textMaxCharacters). For interactive pages that need clicks or form fills, escalate to npx firecrawl-cli browser (see references/firecrawl-tips.md).
Parallel call failures: If any tool call in a parallel batch fails, all sibling calls fail too. Retry individually. Keep failure-prone calls (Reddit MCP) in their own batch.
Rate limits: Retry once after a short pause. If still blocked, try a different tool for the same intent before giving up -- Exa rate-limited? Try Firecrawl search. Reddit MCP throttled? Try Exa with includeDomains: ["reddit.com"]. Only note the gap and move on after both the original tool and an alternative have failed.
batching gotchas, rate limits
category approach
parameter support, portfolio exploration
highlights/summaries
browser), PDF scraping, arxiv extraction, MCP fallback notes
JSON, policy-blocked sites, API workarounds
~30 seconds. Free. No account. Every finding cites a rule and a line of evidence.