exa-search

exa-search is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Lord1Egypt/scientific-agent-toolkit. It costs 116 tokens per session (1,147 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of exa-search, MIT.

A web research tool for searching online sources and extracting content from web pages, articles, and PDFs. It is tuned for scientific and technical information.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to look up current information, research scientific topics, find technical material, or read content from a supplied URL.
Why use it?
It avoids manually searching multiple sources or copying content from a specific link when researching a topic.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to look up current information, research scientific topics, find technical material, or read content from a supplied URL.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/lord1egypt/scientific-agent-toolkit/exa-search
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add Lord1Egypt/scientific-agent-toolkit --skill exa-search
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Lord1Egypt/scientific-agent-toolkit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for exa-search

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/lord1egypt/scientific-agent-toolkit/exa-search/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/lord1egypt/scientific-agent-toolkit/exa-search)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/lord1egypt/scientific-agent-toolkit/exa-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/lord1egypt/scientific-agent-toolkit/exa-search/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for exa-search

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/lord1egypt/scientific-agent-toolkit/exa-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/lord1egypt/scientific-agent-toolkit/exa-search.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 116 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,147 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin 94% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00116 $0.01147
Opus 5 $0.00058 $0.00574
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00229
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00115

Measured 12d ago against content hash 51e1f2eb64f6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

exa-search scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 3 executable files (scripts/exa_extract.py, scripts/exa_search.py, tests/test_exa_search.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

94% identical to exa-search — 11 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

scientific-skills/exa-search/SKILL.md · 96 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 96 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

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.

Read the full file on GitHub · 96 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 96 lines · 116 tokens per session scan A 51e1f2eb64f6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

exa-search is a skill published in the GitHub repository Lord1Egypt/scientific-agent-toolkit (3 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 116 tokens to every session and 1,147 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 94% identical to exa-search, differing in 11 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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