parallel-web-tools

Purpose

Provide a repeatable workflow to:

• discover relevant URLs with Parallel Search
• extract clean markdown from URLs (including JS-heavy pages and PDFs) with Parallel Extract
• return objective-focused excerpts or full content depending on task

When to use

Use when asked to:

• search the web for relevant sources with an explicit objective
• extract clean markdown from one or many URLs
• do “scrape this page” but want objective-focused excerpts, not raw HTML

What this skill is not

• Not a live browser probe for computed styles or hover/focus diffs.
• For “CSS etc”, use a browser-probe lane (agent-browser / Playwright) alongside Parallel.

Required setup

• Set environment variable PARALLEL_API_KEY.
• Base URL: https://api.parallel.ai
• Headers:
  • x-api-key: <key>
  • parallel-beta: search-extract-2025-10-10

Workflow

1) Decide search vs extract

• Use Search when URLs are unknown.
• Use Extract when URLs are known.

2) Search

• Provide objective and/or search_queries
• mode: one-shot | agentic | fast
• Capture url, title, publish_date (if present), excerpts

3) Extract

• Provide urls list
• objective optional (recommended)
• excerpts=true for objective-aligned snippets
• full_content=true for full markdown

4) Error handling

• Retry failures up to 2 times with backoff.
• Batch requests if rate limits appear.

Output shape recommendation

• run_metadata
• search_results (if used)
• extract_results (if used)
• errors/warnings

Use scripts/parallel_search_extract.py for a ready-to-run CLI.