Exa Search Skill#

This skill extends Manus's capabilities with a custom-built, semantic search engine optimized specifically for AI agents and LLMs. It enables neural search, clean Markdown extraction, extractive query highlights, and conceptual similarity searches.

When to Use#

Use this skill when:

1. You need to search the web using complex natural language prompts rather than raw keywords.
2. You need clean, boilerplate-free Markdown text from web pages for LLM context windows.
3. You need query-relevant extractive snippets ( highlights) to reduce token consumption.
4. You need to perform similarity searches using an existing URL as a conceptual query.
5. You need to perform deep, multi-step web research or build structured lists using schema validation.

Core Capabilities & Commands#

1. Neural Search ( /search)#

Query Exa's index using semantic embeddings. Unlike keyword matching, this understands the conceptual meaning of your prompt.

python

from exa_py import Exa
exa = Exa(api_key="YOUR_EXA_API_KEY")

results = exa.search(
    query="companies building innovative fusion energy reactors",
    type="auto",
    num_results=5,
    contents={"highlights": True}
)

2. Clean Web Extraction ( /contents)#

Retrieve webpage content stripped of navigation menus, sidebars, advertisements, and other boilerplate, returned as clean Markdown.

python

contents = exa.get_contents(
    urls=["https://example.com/target-article"],
    text=True,
    max_age_hours=24
)

3. Similar Link Discovery ( /findSimilar)#

Find conceptually similar pages in Exa's index using a starting URL as your query.

python

similar = exa.find_similar(
    url="https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.06435",
    num_results=5
)

Advanced Workflows & Best Practices#

Cache Freshness & Live Crawling#

By default, Exa serves cached pages to optimize speed. To control cache freshness, use max_age_hours instead of deprecated livecrawl parameters:

• max_age_hours=0: Forces a live crawl of the URL.
• max_age_hours=1: Uses cache if it's less than 1 hour old, otherwise performs a live crawl.
• max_age_hours=-1: Cache-only lookup (never crawl).

Subpage Crawling#

Automatically discover and extract content from linked subpages on a target site. Highly effective for documentation or news archives:

python

results = exa.get_contents(
    ["https://docs.exa.ai"],
    subpages=10,
    subpage_target=["api", "reference"],
    max_age_hours=24
)

RAG Integration Pattern#

Always format extracted contents cleanly into XML blocks for downstream LLM generation:

python

context = "\n".join([
    f"<source><url>{r.url}</url><highlights>{r.highlights}</highlights></source>"
    for r in results.results
])

References & Resources#

• Detailed API endpoints and SDK configurations: API Reference
• Command-line search utility: Execute /home/ubuntu/skills/exa-search/scripts/exa_search.py --help