AugmentClaude
User ResearchETLResearch

Rival Search

By damionrashford· damionrashford/RivalSearchMCP· 0

Search the web, social platforms, news, academic databases, and GitHub in one go.

Installation

  1. Make sure Claude is on your device and in your terminal.

    Skills load from ~/.claude/skills/ when Claude Code starts up — so you need it on your machine first. If you don't have it yet, install it once with the command below, then run claude in any terminal to verify.

    One-time setup
    npm i -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code

    Already have it? Skip ahead.

  2. Paste into Claude Code or into your terminal.
    Install
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    This copies the whole skill folder into ~/.claude/skills/rival-search-mcp-damionrashford/ — the SKILL.md plus any scripts, reference docs, or templates the skill ships with. Safe default: works for every skill.

    Faster alternative (instruction-only skills)

    Skips the clone and grabs only the SKILL.md file. Don't use this if the skill ships Python scripts, reference markdowns, or asset templates — they won't be downloaded and the skill will fail when it tries to load them.

    Quick install (SKILL.md only)
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  3. Restart Claude Code.

    Quit and reopen Claude Code (or any other agent that loads from ~/.claude/skills/). New skills are picked up on startup.

  4. Just ask Claude.

    Skills auto-activate when your request matches the skill's description — no slash command needed. Trigger phrases live in the skill's own frontmatter; you can read them in the “What this skill does” section above.

Prefer to read the source first? Open on GitHub.

When Claude uses it

Deterministic deep research via RivalSearchMCP. 9 tools: 5-engine web search (DuckDuckGo/Bing/Yahoo/Mojeek/Wikipedia), 9-platform social search (Reddit/HN/StackOverflow/Dev.to/Medium/ProductHunt/Bluesky/Lobste.rs/Lemmy), 5-source news (Google/Bing/Guardian/GDELT/DDG), 5 academic DBs (OpenAlex/CrossRef/arXiv/PubMed/EuropePMC), GitHub search, website mapping, content extraction with OCR, and research topic synthesis. No API keys required. Use when the user needs web research, competitive analysis, content discovery, or academic paper search.

What this skill does

RivalSearchMCP

You have access to 9 research tools via the CLI at scripts/cli.py. Run all commands with uv run scripts/cli.py.

Every tool returns deterministic, auditable output. There is no in-server LLM — you're the one doing the synthesis.

How to invoke tools

uv run scripts/cli.py call-tool <tool_name> --flag value

Available tools

  • web_search — concurrent search across DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo, Mojeek, Wikipedia. Use for general web queries.
  • social_search — Reddit, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, Dev.to, Medium, Product Hunt, Bluesky, Lobste.rs, Lemmy. Use for community discussions.
  • news_aggregation — Google News, Bing News, The Guardian, GDELT, DuckDuckGo News. Use for current events. Accepts --time-range day|week|month|anytime.
  • github_search — search public GitHub repos. Use for code, libraries, projects.
  • map_website — crawl a site in research / docs / map mode. Use to explore site structure or documentation.
  • content_operations — one tool, six ops (retrieve, stream, analyze, extract, score, find_conflicts). Use to get full page content, rate source quality, or surface disagreements between sources.
  • document_analysis — extract text from PDFs, Word docs, images (image OCR via EasyOCR). Use for document processing.
  • research_topic — end-to-end research workflow for a topic, combining search, content retrieval, and analysis.
  • scientific_research — OpenAlex, CrossRef, arXiv, PubMed, Europe PMC (papers) + Kaggle, HuggingFace, Dataverse, Zenodo (datasets).

When to chain tools

  • Found a URL from search? → content_operations --operation retrieve --url <url>
  • Want to assess source trust before using results? → content_operations --operation score --urls '[…]'
  • Two sources seem to disagree? → content_operations --operation find_conflicts --urls '[…]'
  • Found a PDF link? → document_analysis --url <url>
  • Need to explore a website? → map_website --url <url> --mode docs
  • Need a unified entity profile in one shot? → research_topic --mode entity --topic "OpenAI"

Tool reference

For full flags, types, and defaults for each tool, read:

Output

All tools return structured text to stdout. Errors go to stderr. Exit codes: 0 success, 1 tool error, 2 connection failed.

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