Web research

Skill jeremylongshore/claude-code-plugins-plus-skills/plugins/productivity/cli-power-skills/skills/web-research

425 plugins, 2,810 skills, 200 agents for Claude Code. Open-source marketplace at tonsofskills.com with the ccpi CLI package manager.

Install

npx -y skills add jeremylongshore/claude-code-plugins-plus-skills --skill web-research

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

What its author says it does

Copied from the file, not written here

Use when extracting article text from news URLs or downloading video or audio with metadata

The file declares its own license as MIT. That is the author’s claim about this one file, and it is not the same thing as the license GitHub reports for the repository, which is listed with the other numbers below.

SKILL.md

3.1 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

Web Research

When to Use

Extracting clean article text and metadata from a news/blog URL
Downloading video or audio from supported sites with full metadata
Getting video/audio metadata without downloading the media

Tools

Tool	Purpose	Structured output
newspaper4k	Extract article text, title, authors, date from URLs	Python object (access `.title`, `.text`, `.authors`)
yt-dlp	Download video/audio from 1000+ sites	`--dump-json` for metadata JSON

Patterns

Extract article text from a URL

python3 -c "
from newspaper import Article
a = Article('https://example.com/news/article')
a.download()
a.parse()
import json
print(json.dumps({'title': a.title, 'authors': a.authors, 'date': str(a.publish_date), 'text': a.text[:2000]}, indent=2))
"

Extract multiple articles

for url in "https://example.com/article1" "https://example.com/article2"; do
  python3 -c "
from newspaper import Article
import json
a = Article('$url')
a.download()
a.parse()
print(json.dumps({'url': '$url', 'title': a.title, 'text': a.text[:1000]}))
"
done

Get video metadata without downloading

yt-dlp --dump-json "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID" | jq '{title, duration, view_count, upload_date}'

Download audio only (best quality)

yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"

Download video (best quality, specific format)

yt-dlp -f "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"

Download with metadata and subtitles

yt-dlp --write-info-json --write-subs --sub-langs en "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"

List available formats for a video

yt-dlp -F "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"

Pipelines

Get video metadata → query with DuckDB

yt-dlp --dump-json "https://www.youtube.com/@channel/videos" --flat-playlist | head -20 > videos.jsonl
duckdb -c "SELECT title, view_count, duration FROM read_json_auto('videos.jsonl') ORDER BY view_count DESC LIMIT 10"

Each stage: yt-dlp dumps playlist metadata as JSONL, DuckDB queries for top videos by views.

Prefer Over

Prefer newspaper4k over curl + HTML parsing for article extraction — handles boilerplate removal, metadata extraction automatically
Prefer yt-dlp over browser downloads — supports 1000+ sites, can extract metadata without downloading

Do NOT Use When

Need to interact with a web page (click, scroll, fill forms) — use web-crawling skill (Playwright)
Real-time search with the WebSearch tool available — prefer the built-in tool for conversational search
Downloading copyrighted content without authorization
Target site requires authentication — use web-crawling skill with login automation