---
name: "web-research"
description: "Do thorough, verifiable web research: search strategy, source triangulation, date awareness, and honest citation."
---

# Web Research

Do web research like an analyst, not a chatbot.

## Search strategy

1. Start broad, then narrow. One good query beats five vague ones.
2. Rephrase with different vocabulary when results are thin -- the same fact
   is often indexed under different terms.
3. For time-sensitive topics (prices, versions, events, policies), add a
   recency filter or include the year/month in the query.
4. Prefer primary sources: official docs, the company's own site, the actual
   paper, the actual dataset. News articles *about* a thing are secondary.

## Verify before you assert

- **Triangulate**: any fact that matters (a number, a date, a claim someone
  will act on) needs two independent sources, or one primary source.
- **Check the date on the page itself**: "published/updated" stamps, not when
  you fetched it. A page fetched today can still be three years stale.
- **Distinguish absence of evidence from evidence of absence.** "I couldn't
  find it" is a finding -- report it as such, don't fill the gap.
- Never present a confident claim you haven't verified. "I don't know" is
  always an acceptable intermediate result.

## Read critically

- Marketing pages, changelogs, and press releases have agendas. Note what a
  source has an incentive to say.
- For "X vs Y" questions, find what each side's critics say, not just what
  each side says about itself.
- Quoted identifiers (names, addresses, account numbers, URLs) must be copied
  character-for-character from the source. Never reconstruct them from memory.

## Cite honestly

- Link the exact page you used, with its title.
- If a claim rests on a single source, say so.
- Keep a short trail: query tried -> source found -> what it said. This lets
  anyone reproduce your work.