The Exa API retrieves the best content on the web using embeddings-based search.
Exa was built with a simple goal — organize all knowledge. Today, the world’s knowledge is scattered across billions of sites and we find things based on keywords. Exa will organize this knowledge into an intelligent database and we’ll find things based on meaning. For example, keywords can’t handle these queries, but Exa will:
“Extract all ideas from New York newspapers in the 1960s talking about the future of AI systems”.
“Find every person in SF who has worked on rust compilers and would disagree with this blog post I wrote”.
If we handle these types of queries, we won’t merely have a better search engine — we’d be unlocking knowledge in a way not seen since the printing press.
This is one among many items I will regularly tag in Pinboard as oegconnect, and automatically post tagged as #OEGConnect to Mastodon. Do you know of something else we should share like this? Just reply below and we will check it out.
This is a kind of service we will likely see more emerge, its somewhat similar to how Bing search applies ChatGPT to reframe a web search, sends to Bing, and again applies ChatGPT to summarize the resulting matches (and providing links to sources the search returned.
I tried Exa.ai in response elsewhere to a request on recommendations for attributing AI generated content. Like the site claims, it skips much of the google search results that are full of ad-laden link lists. See
Each resulting search provides a “search for similar” button that frames a new query based on the web address of the one result. In my quick test, it did provide more useful results, that were related or at least of interest.
A free account gets you 1000 results a month, which might get used quickly, but may work for occasional queries. I’m curious to hear of others experiences using these kinds of AI aided searches.