/Research

name: Research
evals:
  manual:
    reason: "research quality depends on whether sources support the requested claims and the synthesis represents uncertainty honestly"
    falsifier: "the reviewer finds a cited source does not support its claim, a material counter-source is omitted, or confidence is overstated"
metadata:
  short-description: "Find, identify, and investigate topics or products with multi-source agents and verified URLs. Use ArXiv for papers and ExtractWisdom for insights."
version: 1.8.0
description: Multi-agent web research with verified URLs and confidence-tagged output at four depths. USE WHEN research, do research, quick research, extensive research, deep investigation, find information, investigate, extract alpha, analyze content, retrieve content, AI trends, enhance content, extract knowledge, web scraping, YouTube extraction, map landscape, competitive analysis, find it, find this, find this product, identify this, what is this, what's that thing, track down, locate, help me find, I can't find X online, can't find it online, source this, best X in a place, what's good in <city>, trip or itinerary planning, things to do, is X open, hours, where is X, venue or resort policies — never substitute raw WebSearch/WebFetch for a find/identify/investigate/look-up request. NOT FOR entity background, papers (ArXiv), JSON entity extraction, wisdom extraction (ExtractWisdom), raw page fetching or crawling (BrightData).

Research

**Contents:** Ideal State · Intent Routing · Tool contract · Output format · Data & Config · Gotchas · References

Researches a topic across multiple sources and verifies every claim before delivery. Four depth modes scale from a single fast lookup to a multi-session investigation: Quick (1 Perplexity call, ~10-15s), Standard (four vendors cross-checked as parallel tool calls in the session, ~30-60s), Extensive (7 explorers + 2 independent verifiers, ~60-90s), and Deep Investigation (progressive iteration with a persistent vault, ~3-60min). Output is confidence-tagged: [HIGH] [MED] [LOW] [CONFLICT].

A lone research agent fails in two quiet ways. It hallucinates URLs, confident links that go nowhere and cost the whole report its trust. And it answers from one angle, parroting the first few search results and missing conflicts, gaps, and what real people thought; asked "what did fans think of X", it hands back promoter copy dressed as consensus. This skill runs several vendors in parallel (as tool calls at Quick and Standard, as researcher agents at Extensive and Deep), cross-checks and independently verifies their findings, checks every URL before it ships, and routes sentiment questions to community sources first.

**Vendor diversity scales with effort.** Quick is one vendor, Standard four, Extensive and Deep all five. Each vendor's model comes from a different training distribution, so the more a question is worth, the more independent distributions check it.

Ideal State

• Every URL in a delivered answer was fetched and its page supports the claim it is cited for; a link that could not be verified was dropped, never shipped.
• The depth matches the ask: "research" alone ran Standard, Quick ran only on an explicit quick request or an everyday look-up, and each tier's vendor roster was complete (a higher tier never drops a vendor a lower tier uses), or the answer says which slot was swapped and why.
• Findings carry `[HIGH]` `[MED]` `[LOW]` `[CONFLICT]` tags from cross-checking, and a disagreement between sources is shown with both sides rather than averaged away.
• A sentiment or lived-experience answer rests on the communities first (each platform's official API, then a licensed data product only where the platform has no API, then web search for context), quotes people verbatim with their thread URLs, and carries the disappointments alongside the praise.
• A claim that a venue exists, is open, keeps certain hours, or books a certain way matches the official page of the venue or its host property.
• A request this skill should not own left it: entity background to an OSINT skill, papers to ArXiv, an X URL through the X-URL gate with the path taken named in the answer.

Intent Routing

| Intent | Trigger | File | |--------|---------|------| | **QuickResearch** | "quick research", "minor research", everyday look-ups (venue, hours, travel, best-of); 1 Perplexity call, 1 query, no agent | `Intents/QuickResearch.md` | | **StandardResearch** | "research", "do research", "research this": the DEFAULT; Claude + Gemini + Perplexity + OpenAI/Codex cross-checked as parallel tool calls in the session, no agents; + Grok when X is a plausible source | `Intents/StandardResearch.md` | | **ExtensiveResearch** | "extensive research", "deep research", "comprehensive research"; all five vendors, 7 explorers + 2 verifiers, + a community slot on lived-experience questions | `Intents/ExtensiveResearch.md` | | **DeepInvestigation** | "deep investigation", "investigate [topic]", "map the [X] landscape"; progressive deepening into a persistent vault, loop-compatible | `Intents/DeepInvestigation.md` | | **DeepVerifiedResearch** | deep verified or fact-checked research: claim-level adversarial verification, the slowest tier (Tool contract below) | `Intents/DeepVerifiedResearch.mjs` | | **Verify** | Verify research findings / cross-check claims / confidence scoring | `Intents/Verify.md` | | **ExtractAlpha** | Extract alpha / deep analysis / highest-alpha insights | `Intents/ExtractAlpha.md` | | **Retrieve** | Difficulty accessing content (JavaScript-rendered pages, multi-page pulls, a site that refuses automated access) | `Intents/Retrieve.md` | | **YoutubeExtraction** | YouTube URL extraction (use `fabric -y URL` immediately) | `Intents/YoutubeExtraction.md` | | **WebScraping** | Web scraping | `Intents/WebScraping.md` | | **ClaudeResearch** | Claude WebSearch only (free, no API keys) | `Intents/ClaudeResearch.md` | | **InterviewResearch** | Interview preparat