exa-web-search-free_skill

Overview

This skill provides free AI-powered web, code, and company search through Exa MCP with no API key required. It surfaces current news, documentation and code examples from GitHub/Stack Overflow, and business intelligence on companies. The skill is tailored for founders, indie hackers, and growth engineers who need fast, practical research workflows. Advanced optional tools enable deeper crawling, filtering, and professional profile lookups.

How this skill works

The skill calls Exa MCP endpoints to run neural search across web pages, code repositories, Q&A sites, and company data. Use web_search_exa for news and facts, get_code_context_exa for code samples and docs, and company_research_exa for business intelligence. Optional advanced tools add domain/date filters, query expansion, full-page crawling, and people search for more targeted or exhaustive investigations.

When to use it

• Quickly gather current news or fact-check emerging AI developments.
• Retrieve code examples, API usage, and Stack Overflow solutions during development.
• Compile company profiles, recent announcements, and funding or hiring signals.
• Run deeper research when preparing pitch materials, blog posts, or technical write-ups.
• Automate periodic market monitoring or competitive intelligence tasks.

Best practices

• Pick type:"fast" for quick lookups and "deep" for thorough research to balance speed and coverage.
• For code search, lower tokensNum (1,000–2,000) to focus results or raise it (5,000+) for comprehensive context.
• Combine web_search_exa results with get_code_context_exa to validate technical claims with real examples.
• Use the advanced config only when you need domain/date filters, crawling, or people search to avoid unnecessary complexity.
• Start with a narrow query and expand only if results are sparse; use query expansion tool for hard-to-find topics.

Example use cases

• Founders preparing a competitor landscape: pull recent news, product pages, and reported hires.
• Developers debugging a library: fetch GitHub examples and Stack Overflow solutions with get_code_context_exa.
• Content creators writing timely articles: assemble primary sources and citations from web_search_exa.
• Growth engineers monitoring market signals: schedule periodic company_research_exa calls for alerts.
• Technical due diligence: run deep_search_exa and crawling_exa to collect full-page evidence and timestamped sources.