Researching Web

Web Research with Perplexity

Use mcp__perplexity-ask__perplexity_ask for web search.

When to Use

• Best practices and recommendations
• Current information (releases, news)
• Comparisons between technologies
• Factual questions about tools/libraries

Usage

{
  "messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Your research question" }]
}

Tips

• Be specific: "Go error handling best practices 2024"
• Include context: "Redis vs Memcached for session storage"
• Ask comparisons: "Pros and cons of gRPC vs REST"

Gotchas

• Search quality varies by phrasing — "X best practices" returns curated guides; "X mistakes" returns blog rants. Same intent, very different results.
• Multi-source synthesis doesn't auto-detect contradictions — facts from sources A and B may directly contradict; the skill doesn't flag this.
• Date filtering ("last year") is unreliable — search engines may include cached older content that was indexed recently.
• Rate limits on the underlying search API silently truncate results — a "no results" finding may actually be a quota issue.
• Geo-targeting: same query from different IPs returns different results — VPN switches mid-research produce inconsistent corpus.
• NOT FOR official API/library reference — for those use looking-up-docs (Context7); this skill is for trends, comparisons, news.