research

research is a skill for Claude Code from sydasif/web-search-mcp. It costs 26 tokens per session (3,511 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research workflow for investigating current events, products, people, concepts, and comparisons across multiple sources.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to search broadly, gather source material, compare independent accounts, and produce a structured synthesis of a topic.
Why use it?
It helps separate reported facts from competing claims and makes the strength of the evidence easier to judge.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions Claude Code.

Part of the web-search plugin — 2 skills, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit Use it to search broadly, gather source material, compare independent accounts, and produce a structured synthesis of a topic.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/sydasif/web-search-mcp/research
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 sydasif/web-search-mcp --skill research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sydasif/web-search-mcp

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install web-search, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 2 skills, 1 MCP server.

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 research

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sydasif/web-search-mcp/research/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sydasif/web-search-mcp/research)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sydasif/web-search-mcp/research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sydasif/web-search-mcp/research/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 research

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sydasif/web-search-mcp/research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sydasif/web-search-mcp/research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 26 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,511 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found 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 $0.00026 $0.03511
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.01755
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00702
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00351

Measured 6d ago against content hash 59f89bb53160, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

research 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 6d ago.

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.

skills/research/SKILL.md · 336 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 336 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Deep Research

Operating Principle

Research is breadth-first, then depth-first. Start wide to map the landscape, then dive into the highest-signal sources. Do not jump to a single source type and call it done — each platform reveals a different facet of the topic.

Good research answers not just what happened, but who is saying it, how confident the evidence is, and what the competing narratives are.

Cross-source corroboration: A claim found in 3+ independent sources is stronger than any single source. Multi-platform coverage is the highest-confidence signal.

Internalize the research first: Ground your synthesis in the ACTUAL research content, not your pre-existing knowledge. If sources talk about "ClawdBot" and you assumed "Claude Code", do not conflate them.


Important: What the MCP Handles vs What You Do

This skill uses the web-search MCP server. Search, dedup, clustering, and stats computation, here you do all that synthesis work manually as you read tool results.

The MCP gives you:

  • Search and retrieval across 10 tools covering web, social, academic, and developer platforms
  • Clean extracted content from URLs
  • Rich engagement data (upvotes, comments, views) from community platforms

You are responsible for:

  • Running searches sequentially (no engine to fan out in parallel)
  • Counting and tracking which claims came from which source
  • Spotting patterns and clusters as you read
  • Computing stats manually from result sets
  • Noticing "X Reply Clusters" in Reddit threads yourself

Cost of comparison mode: Comparing 2 entities means roughly 2x the tool calls (~8-12 per entity). Plan your turn budget accordingly. For 3-way comparisons, consider doing a single focused comparison instead of exhaustive per-entity research.


Tool Reference — 10 Web Search Tools

Tier 1 — Broad Discovery & Reference

Tool What It Does When To Use
mcp__plugin_web-search_web-search_search_web DuckDuckGo or Exa web/news search (via provider param) First pass: news, background, official sources
mcp__plugin_web-search_web-search_search_web (domain) DuckDuckGo (site:) or Exa (include_domains) scoped to a domain Targeted docs: docs.python.org, react.dev, RFCs
mcp__plugin_web-search_web-search_fetch_page Clean HTML-to-markdown extraction from URLs Read articles, changelogs, specs, papers
mcp__plugin_web-search_web-search_search_wikipedia Full article text via MediaWiki API Factual summaries, background research, citations
mcp__plugin_web-search_web-search_search_arxiv Academic paper search w/ Lucene field prefixes Research papers, literature reviews, citations

Read the full file on GitHub · 336 lines

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. 6d ago Changed · +1 lines 59f89bb53160
  2. 10d ago First seen · 335 lines · 26 tokens per session scan A 634af1c4a6d6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

research is a skill published in the GitHub repository sydasif/web-search-mcp (24 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 26 tokens to every session and 3,511 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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