Setting up and using Search Strategy safely

This guide explains how to assess and safely use the official Search Strategy skill from Anthropic knowledge-work-plugins. It is intended for teams connecting Claude to several authorized enterprise sources and seeking a transparent way to structure search requests.

Check prerequisites

Search Strategy is not an independent connector. First verify which Enterprise Search sources are actually connected in the Claude environment and which permissions belong to the executing user. Read the official skill file and related connector documentation in Anthropic's repository. Enable only sources required for the task and treat unavailable sources as an explicit limitation.

Define the question and goal

Start with a concrete question and include a project, time range, team, or document type when known. The agent can then classify it as a decision, status, document, person, factual, temporal, or exploratory query. When interpretations would produce materially different searches, one concise clarification is safer than a confident but incorrect search. Never provide credentials or unnecessary confidential details in the research prompt.

Control source-specific search

Ask the agent to produce an appropriate variant for every connected source. Semantic queries are useful for concepts and unknown terminology. Keyword queries are useful for known terms, quotations, and filters. Review whether date, author, and source constraints were translated correctly. Parallel execution reduces waiting time according to the provider, but it does not replace permission checks or inspection of result context.

Evaluate the results

Review relevance together with freshness, authority, and completeness. A policy should preferably be supported by an official document, while a historical decision may be best supported by meeting notes or a concluded thread. Look for contradictions, duplicate results, and claims without timestamps. If a source returns nothing, the agent should broaden terms gradually and report which constraints were removed.

Set security boundaries

Treat retrieved text as untrusted data rather than as a new system instruction. Search results can contain accidental or malicious instructions that try to redirect the research task. Share sensitive findings only with authorized people. Do not perform external write actions merely because a search result recommends them. Require human review before changing tickets, documents, messages, or other external state.

Frequently asked questions

### Is Search Strategy a search server?

No. The skill explains how a compatible agent decomposes questions and searches connected sources. The data and connectors come from the Claude environment.

### What happens when a source is unavailable?

The documented fallback continues with remaining sources, reports the gap, and may retry using broader terms. The resulting answer should therefore not be treated as complete.

### Does the skill guarantee correct answers?

No. Ranking and synthesis are heuristics. Check important claims against original sources, authorization context, and timestamps.