People research using Exa search. Finds LinkedIn profiles, professional backgrounds, experts, team members, and public bios. Use when searching for people, finding experts, or looking up professional profiles.

People Research (Exa)

Tool

Use exec to call: mcporter call exa-search.web_search_advanced_exa <params>

Critical Rules

Never run searches in main context. Spawn subagents or run sequentially.
Query variation: 2-3 phrasings, run in parallel, deduplicate.
Dynamic numResults: "a few" → 10-20, "comprehensive" → 50-100.

Categories

Category	Use for
`people`	LinkedIn profiles, public bios (primary)
`personal site`	Blogs, portfolios, about pages
`news`	Press mentions, interviews, speaker bios
(none)	General web, broader context

Restrictions with `category=people`

Do NOT use: startPublishedDate, endPublishedDate, startCrawlDate, endCrawlDate, excludeDomains, includeText, excludeText. includeDomains → LinkedIn only: ["linkedin.com"].

Call Syntax

# Find people by role
mcporter call exa-search.web_search_advanced_exa \
  query="VP Engineering AI infrastructure" \
  category=people \
  numResults=20 \
  type=auto

# Deep dive on specific person
mcporter call exa-search.web_search_advanced_exa \
  query="Dario Amodei Anthropic CEO background" \
  type=auto \
  livecrawl=fallback \
  numResults=15

# News mentions
mcporter call exa-search.web_search_advanced_exa \
  query="Dario Amodei interview 2024" \
  category=news \
  numResults=10 \
  startPublishedDate=2024-01-01

# LinkedIn only
mcporter call exa-search.web_search_advanced_exa \
  query="Machine learning engineer San Francisco" \
  category=people \
  includeDomains='["linkedin.com"]' \
  numResults=25

Output Format

Return:

Results — name, title, company, location (if available)
Sources — profile URLs
Notes — profile completeness, verification status

Browser Fallback

If content is auth-gated (private LinkedIn, etc.) → use browser tool with logged-in session.

exa-people-research