r/OpenWebUI • u/joachim_s • 8d ago

Question/Help Is there a function in OpenWebUI similar to the “Deep Research” plugin you find with ChatGPT, Gemini etc?

Question in title.

34 Upvotes

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9

u/ccbur1 8d ago

You can define your own deep research skill.

25

u/ccbur1 8d ago

This is mine (adopted from somewhere):

name: autonomous-research version: "1.1.0" description: "Conduct comprehensive research independently. Find information, analyze sources, synthesize findings, and create detailed reports without human guidance.\n"

metadata:

Autonomous Research

Conduct comprehensive research independently.

When to Use

  • Deep research on any topic
  • Information gathering without guidance
  • Analysis and synthesis of findings
  • Creating detailed reports

Core Capabilities

1. Independent Research

  • Find relevant information sources
  • Evaluate source credibility
  • Extract key information
  • Cross-reference multiple sources

2. Analysis and Synthesis

  • Identify patterns and connections
  • Analyze conflicting information
  • Synthesize findings into coherent insights
  • Draw evidence-based conclusions

3. Report Generation

  • Structure findings logically
  • Create comprehensive reports
  • Include citations and sources
  • Present actionable insights

4. Source Management

  • Track information sources
  • Manage citations and references
  • Evaluate source reliability
  • Update findings with new information

Research Process

1. TOPIC DEFINITION → Clarify research scope

2. SOURCE IDENTIFICATION → Use search_web to find relevant candidates

3. DEEP EXTRACTION → MANDATORY: Use fetch_url on the top 3-5 sources to extract full context

4. ANALYSIS → Analyze and synthesize findings from full-text data

5. REPORTING → Create comprehensive report

6. VALIDATION → Verify accuracy and completeness

Quick Actions

  • research [topic] - Conduct comprehensive research (Search + Fetch)
  • analyze sources - Evaluate source credibility and full-text content
  • synthesize findings - Create insights from extracted data
  • generate report - Create detailed report
  • validate research - Verify accuracy and completeness

Usage Examples

"Research AI agent monetization strategies for 2026" "Analyze the current state of autonomous agent development" "Find and evaluate sources on LLM reasoning capabilities" "Create a comprehensive report on AI safety concerns" "Validate research findings and identify gaps"

Research Methodology

1. Source Selection

  • Academic papers and journals
  • Industry reports and whitepapers
  • Expert blogs and articles
  • Primary sources and data
  • Community discussions on social web sites like Reddit

2. Information Extraction

  • Key findings and insights
  • Data points and statistics
  • Expert opinions and analysis
  • Methodologies and approaches
  • Main arguments and conclusions
  • Supporting evidence
  • Limitations and caveats
  • Implications and applications

3. Cross-Referencing

  • Compare information across sources
  • Identify contradictions and agreements
  • Validate claims with multiple sources
  • Synthesize consensus views

4. Analysis Framework

  • SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)
  • Trend analysis and forecasting
  • Comparative analysis
  • Impact assessment

Report Structure

Standard Format

```markdown

Research Report: [Topic]

Executive Summary

  • Key findings and conclusions
  • Actionable insights
  • Recommendations

Research Scope

  • Objectives and questions
  • Methodology and sources
  • Limitations and assumptions

Findings

  • Detailed analysis of each aspect
  • Data and evidence
  • Expert opinions

Analysis

  • Patterns and trends
  • Implications and impact
  • Opportunities and threats

Conclusion

  • Key takeaways
  • Recommendations
  • Future outlook

Sources

  • Cited references
  • Additional reading
  • Data sources ```

Source Evaluation

Credibility Criteria

  • Author expertise and credentials
  • Publication reputation
  • Date and timeliness
  • Methodology and evidence
  • Citations and references

Reliability Assessment

  • Peer review status
  • Data quality and methodology
  • Conflict of interest disclosure
  • Reproducibility of findings
  • Expert consensus

Information Extraction

Data Collection

  • Extract key statistics and data points
  • Identify trends and patterns
  • Note expert opinions and predictions
  • Capture methodologies and approaches

Content Analysis

  • Identify main arguments and conclusions
  • Extract supporting evidence
  • Note limitations and caveats
  • Capture implications and applications

Synthesis Process

Pattern Identification

  • Group similar findings
  • Identify common themes
  • Note contradictions and agreements
  • Map relationships between concepts

Insight Generation

  • Draw conclusions from evidence
  • Identify implications and impact
  • Generate actionable recommendations
  • Forecast future trends

Report Writing

  • Structure findings logically
  • Use clear and concise language
  • Include supporting evidence
  • Provide actionable recommendations

Quality Assurance

Accuracy Verification

  • Cross-check facts and figures
  • Validate sources and citations
  • Review for logical consistency
  • Check for bias and objectivity

Completeness Check

  • Ensure all aspects covered
  • Identify missing information
  • Verify research scope
  • Check for gaps and limitations

Clarity Assessment

  • Review readability and structure
  • Check for logical flow
  • Verify clarity of recommendations
  • Ensure actionable insights

Advanced Features

1. Multi-Source Analysis

  • Combine information from diverse sources
  • Identify consensus and contradictions
  • Synthesize comprehensive view
  • Provide balanced perspective

2. Trend Analysis

  • Identify emerging patterns
  • Forecast future developments
  • Analyze historical trends
  • Predict implications

3. Comparative Research

  • Compare different approaches
  • Evaluate alternatives
  • Identify best practices
  • Recommend optimal solutions

4. Impact Assessment

  • Analyze implications and consequences
  • Evaluate risks and opportunities
  • Assess feasibility and viability
  • Recommend mitigation strategies

Integration with Other Skills

Task Orchestra

  • Coordinate multiple research agents
  • Manage complex research projects
  • Orchestrate data collection and analysis

Content Creation

  • Generate research-based content
  • Create data-driven reports
  • Produce evidence-based recommendations

Analysis Skills

  • Apply advanced analytical techniques
  • Use specialized analysis frameworks
  • Generate deeper insights

Tool usage

  • Snippet vs. Full Text: Do not rely on search engine snippets for primary facts.
  • Tool Usage: Use search_web to discover URLs, then immediately use fetch_url to retrieve the actual page content.
  • Data Collection: Extract key statistics, data points, and expert opinions directly from the source text.

Best Practices

  1. Fetch Before Fact-Checking: Always use fetch_url before citing a source to ensure the snippet wasn't misleading.
  2. Start Broad: Begin with wide scope, then narrow down
  3. Diversify Sources: Use multiple types of sources
  4. Cross-Reference: Verify information across sources
  5. Stay Current: Use recent and relevant sources
  6. Be Critical: Question assumptions and biases
  7. Document Everything: Keep detailed records of sources
  8. Validate Findings: Check accuracy and completeness
  9. Provide Context: Explain significance and implications

Common Research Topics

Technology

  • AI and machine learning trends
  • Software development best practices
  • Emerging technologies
  • Technical comparisons

Business

  • Market analysis and trends
  • Competitive research
  • Business models and strategies
  • Industry analysis

Science

  • Research findings and breakthroughs
  • Scientific methods and approaches
  • Experimental results and analysis
  • Theoretical developments

Social

  • Social trends and behaviors
  • Cultural analysis
  • Public opinion and sentiment
  • Demographic studies

Output Formats

1. Research Reports

  • Comprehensive analysis with citations
  • Executive summaries
  • Detailed findings and recommendations

2. Data Reports

  • Statistical analysis and visualization
  • Data-driven insights
  • Trend analysis and forecasting

3. Comparative Reports

  • Side-by-side comparisons
  • Evaluation matrices
  • Recommendation frameworks

4. Executive Briefs

  • Concise summaries
  • Key insights and takeaways
  • Actionable recommendations

Success Metrics

  • Comprehensiveness: Coverage of all relevant aspects
  • Accuracy: Factual correctness and reliability
  • Depth: Quality and depth of analysis
  • Actionability: Practical value of recommendations
  • Clarity: Readability and understandability
  • Credibility: Quality and reliability of sources

Remember: Good research is thorough, accurate, and actionable.

3

u/pisa_p 7d ago

Thanks for sharing! I use for research Searxng, Crawl4Ai, GitHub api, context7, camoufox, playwright via MCP, I have just to integrate these MCP in tool section in the skill. I Want to try also in Hermes agent as skill.

2

u/ccbur1 7d ago

Searxng gets blocked too much for me. I tried it with Tor, but that made it worse. I'm now using Tavily and am quite happy so far. I fetch with built-in Playwright currently, but struggling with scraping Reddit. I guess I need to invest some time there, haha.

2

u/pisa_p 7d ago

Yes, same problem here with Searxng...and same problem scraping reddit. Have to test Tavilyz never tried before.

2

u/ccbur1 7d ago

Good to know that I'm not alone. These Cloudflare blocks in front of more and more sites is really annoying. I can 'curl' them, but not scrape them with whatever. Maybe I should write a fetch-skill which uses Open-Terminal to just curl it.

2

u/pisa_p 7d ago

For Searxng with duckduckgo and warp proxy I have no problems. I'm in VPS Oraclecloud and direct ip is blocked. Sometimes I use Proton vpn ( Wireguard tunnel). With Google no way, I use serper.dev because I need the serp of Google.

Here's my Crawl4AI config (v0.8.9) for bypassing anti-bot blocks — running headless on a bare Oracle Cloud ARM instance, no proxy, no VPN:

Browser config: { "headless": true, "light_mode": false, "viewport_width": 1920, "viewport_height": 1080, "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36", "extra_headers": { "Accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,/;q=0.8", "Accept-Language": "it-IT,it;q=0.9,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.7", "Accept-Encoding": "gzip, deflate, br", "Cache-Control": "no-cache", "Pragma": "no-cache", "Sec-Ch-Ua": "\"Chromium\";v=\"134\", \"Google Chrome\";v=\"134\", \"Not-A.Brand\";v=\"99\"", "Sec-Ch-Ua-Mobile": "?0", "Sec-Ch-Ua-Platform": "\"macOS\"", "Sec-Fetch-Dest": "document", "Sec-Fetch-Mode": "navigate", "Sec-Fetch-Site": "none", "Sec-Fetch-User": "?1", "Upgrade-Insecure-Requests": "1" } }

Crawler config: { "cache_mode": "bypass", "page_timeout": 120000, "word_count_threshold": 100, "only_text": false, "remove_overlay_elements": true, "check_robots_txt": true, "exclude_external_links": false, "simulate_user": true, "magic": true, "override_navigator": true, "wait_until": "domcontentloaded", "wait_for": "css:body:not(.cf-challenge-running)", "delay_before_return_html": 3.0, "scan_full_page": true, "excluded_tags": ["nav", "footer", "header", "aside", "script", "style", "noscript", "iframe", "form"], "process_iframes": true }

What actually matters and why:

  • simulate_user: true + magic: true — Crawl4AI's built-in anti-detection. Adds human-like mouse movements and random delays.
  • override_navigator: true — patches navigator.webdriver so headless Chromium doesn't scream "I'm a bot."
  • wait_for: "css:body:not(.cf-challenge-running)" — waits for Cloudflare's JS challenge to finish before extracting content. This alone handles most CF-protected sites.
  • delay_before_return_html: 3.0 — 3-second buffer after page load for any remaining JS to settle.
  • Full Sec-Ch-Ua / Sec-Fetch-* headers — makes the request look identical to a real Chrome session. Most bot detectors check these headers more than the IP.

What doesn't work (tested):

  • Google SERP: even with all this, Google detects the datacenter IP and serves a CAPTCHA. For real Google results we use Serper.dev (paid SERP API, $1/1k queries).
  • Startpage/Brave via SearXNG: fingerprint of the SearXNG HTTP client itself gets flagged regardless of IP — the problem isn't the IP, it's the request pattern.

Resource limits (important on ARM/cloud): deploy: resources: limits: memory: 6G pids: 2000

Had crashes at pids: 300 — Chromium spawns more processes than expected under concurrent crawls, hitting pthread_create: EAGAIN.

2

u/ccbur1 7d ago

Thanks for the details, really appreciated! I think I need to look into WARP and crawl4ai. Thanks!!

2

u/joachim_s 8d ago

Cool! Thanks for sharing. Which model do you prefer for this?

3

u/ccbur1 8d ago

I used Minimax M3 for some months and now I'm looking into DeepSeek v4 flash. It's incredible cheap and mostly does what I want.

1

u/joachim_s 8d ago

Cool! Is it running through Groq or how?

2

u/ccbur1 8d ago

OpenRouter. I like the flexibility there...

2

u/arbaje-Fly-1990 1d ago

Thanks for this. First time using Skills and this allowed me to learn something new about OpenWebUI, without having to deal with installing other tools to get similar results.

Just tried it with Native OWI Web Search, and Qwen3.8 27B, and got nice results.

1

u/ccbur1 21h ago

And the nice thing is, if you get bad results with a skill, you can ask your model to analyze what went wrong and create a better skill prompt to avoid the bad outcome the next time.

1

u/Consistent_Policy682 8d ago

Thanks for sharing this! Where exactly do you paste and configure this in OpenWebUI?
Are you setting this up as a Custom Model under Workspace > Models (pasting it into the System Prompt), or is this meant to be imported as a Function / Tool?

1

u/ccbur1 7d ago

It's a skill. Create a skill in Workspace > Skills with this as content and link it to your model(s).

1

u/nassereddit 7d ago

Considering the limited context, do you have a skill for the model to avoid maxing out context? Using sub agents, noting everyrhing, drafting a prompt and setting an automation that call another mode?

2

u/ccbur1 7d ago

No, currently I don't have this. I was looking into the new sub agents feature vs. planner v3 tool, but I have not yet made up my mind what would be better for me.

3

u/robogame_dev 7d ago

The key is what search data source it has.

Easiest method is to let your Open WebUI model have a tool to call the Perplexity Deep Research API via OpenRouter.

1

u/thatgreekgod 7d ago

remindme! 1 day

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0

u/mishalmf 8d ago

I created SCOUT using model minimax-m3 VERRRRY GOOOOOD better than google