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The Parallel Search API

parallel.ai

21–30 of 55 posts

Re: The Parallel Search API

#21
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is going to kill the traditional (free) search engine Yes, this has been issue for for many content creators. I predict that because of this, a lot of internet will get behind a paywall. I run one, so I hope the future is bright, but overall this is very bad for the internet because it was never intended to be used this way. Sure, it will be great for users to save unimaginable amount of time searching manually,…

> that is the end of the internet as we know it. Eh. Some of us remember an internet before the free-with-advertising became the norm. In the 90s and early 2000s people were putting stuff online for free with no desire to monetise that content. And it was way more expensive back then to do so. Today you can host a personal blog for less than a coffee. I for one wouldn't mind going back to people sharing stuff for the…

[deleted]

Re: The Parallel Search API

#22
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is going to kill the traditional (free) search engine Yes, this has been issue for for many content creators. I predict that because of this, a lot of internet will get behind a paywall. I run one, so I hope the future is bright, but overall this is very bad for the internet because it was never intended to be used this way. Sure, it will be great for users to save unimaginable amount of time searching manually,…

Inflation might help the situation; by making microtransactions a more realistic prospect. However, what would really help would be to end Visa, MasterCard, and American Express's monopoly on payments—where they extract at least $0.30 out of every transaction. I used to work for the credit card industry like 15 years ago (damn, I feel old now). Back then , you know how much a credit card transaction actually cost (th…

I agree that they are a cartel tax on the economy, but their costs are higher than that. They are also taking on risk from credit. If your card gets stolen, the thief buys a $3k surfboard, and then you get refunded, they are out the $3k.

They are also paying for the rewards on top of the points given out.

Again, not saying they’re not making a ton of profit. It’s higher than you’ve said, though.

Re: The Parallel Search API

#23
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is going to kill the traditional (free) search engine Yes, this has been issue for for many content creators. I predict that because of this, a lot of internet will get behind a paywall. I run one, so I hope the future is bright, but overall this is very bad for the internet because it was never intended to be used this way. Sure, it will be great for users to save unimaginable amount of time searching manually,…

> that is the end of the internet as we know it. Eh. Some of us remember an internet before the free-with-advertising became the norm. In the 90s and early 2000s people were putting stuff online for free with no desire to monetise that content. And it was way more expensive back then to do so. Today you can host a personal blog for less than a coffee. I for one wouldn't mind going back to people sharing stuff for the…

I remember. But you forgot one fact - the amount of users online was miniscule compared to what we have today. That is the bane of everything - saturation. You keep diluting a good thing until only a faint memory of it remains.

Re: The Parallel Search API

#24
post #5

The latency of 5s for the basic tier search request is very confusing to me. Is that 5s per request or 5s per 1k requests? If it is indeed 5s per request that seems like a deal breaker

This is a search agent available in the cloud. The site mentions that they doesn't optimize for being "done in milliseconds and as cheaply as possible", and that they do a lot more work like extracting relevant paragraphs and "Single-call resolution for complex queries that normally require multiple search hops" and more. Geared to be consumed by other agents, hence the latency may be tolerable. They have the advantage of running the agent code close to the index so less expensive searches. Basically, this is something in between a simple google search and a "deep research" or at least "thinking" LLM call.

Re: The Parallel Search API

#25
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is going to kill the traditional (free) search engine Yes, this has been issue for for many content creators. I predict that because of this, a lot of internet will get behind a paywall. I run one, so I hope the future is bright, but overall this is very bad for the internet because it was never intended to be used this way. Sure, it will be great for users to save unimaginable amount of time searching manually,…

Inflation might help the situation; by making microtransactions a more realistic prospect. However, what would really help would be to end Visa, MasterCard, and American Express's monopoly on payments—where they extract at least $0.30 out of every transaction. I used to work for the credit card industry like 15 years ago (damn, I feel old now). Back then , you know how much a credit card transaction actually cost (th…

Chances are it could be similarly expensive because cobol devs are more expensive now? Is very old but still scalable infrastructure really much cheaper to run now?

Re: The Parallel Search API

#26
post #9

I've been saying for quite some time now that AI is going to kill the traditional (free) search engine. This is just another nail in the coffin. When an AI searches google.com for you, the ads never get shown to the user. Search engines like kagi.com are the future. You'll give the AI your Kagi API key and that'll be it. You won't even need cloud-based AI for that kind of thing! Tiny, local models trained for perform…

There are very broad consequences for a world that no longer accesses the web primarily through Google Search. We're building for that too!

Re: The Parallel Search API

#27
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is going to kill the traditional (free) search engine Yes, this has been issue for for many content creators. I predict that because of this, a lot of internet will get behind a paywall. I run one, so I hope the future is bright, but overall this is very bad for the internet because it was never intended to be used this way. Sure, it will be great for users to save unimaginable amount of time searching manually,…

Inflation might help the situation; by making microtransactions a more realistic prospect. However, what would really help would be to end Visa, MasterCard, and American Express's monopoly on payments—where they extract at least $0.30 out of every transaction. I used to work for the credit card industry like 15 years ago (damn, I feel old now). Back then , you know how much a credit card transaction actually cost (th…

I absolutely agree. I have designed the platform to use wallets, so I never involve a third party in my business or the business of the content creators and risk being financially deplatformed(famously often done by Stripe and Paypal). I wanted to give users a chance to use payment cards to deposit money into their wallets, as people are used to paying online with cards, but as the platform provides no service in return, this was incompatible with policies of payment processors and card providers. So users have to make a bank transfer. Thankfully European SEPA payments are nowadays wide-spread and can be instant. People have banking apps on their phones, so it is even faster than using a card. But the use of cards for online payments is seeded too deep for modern users to find this comfortable, yet. Anyhow, I think we are slowly moving away from cards and in time they will hopefully become a thing of the past as internet has been around for ages and cards fulfil absolutely no useful function that cannot be supplement by decentralised solution by modern banks.

Re: The Parallel Search API

#28
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation might help the situation; by making microtransactions a more realistic prospect. However, what would really help would be to end Visa, MasterCard, and American Express's monopoly on payments—where they extract at least $0.30 out of every transaction. I used to work for the credit card industry like 15 years ago (damn, I feel old now). Back then , you know how much a credit card transaction actually cost (th…

I agree that they are a cartel tax on the economy, but their costs are higher than that. They are also taking on risk from credit. If your card gets stolen, the thief buys a $3k surfboard, and then you get refunded, they are out the $3k. They are also paying for the rewards on top of the points given out. Again, not saying they’re not making a ton of profit. It’s higher than you’ve said, though.

You are mixing debit and credit cards here. Debit cards have essentially no protection, only credit cards as they are literally loans and lenders invest in protection of their debtors to make them popular.

Re: The Parallel Search API

#29

Interesting, but I'm not totally convinced that searching for LLMs is different than for us (humans). In the end, we both want to get information that's relevant to our query (intent). Besides, I wonder whether there will be able to convince big players like OpenAI to use them, instead of Google Search with its proven record :)

Does this help? https://x.com/paraga/status/1986480529701806324

Re: The Parallel Search API

#30
post #13
post #9

I've been saying for quite some time now that AI is going to kill the traditional (free) search engine. This is just another nail in the coffin. When an AI searches google.com for you, the ads never get shown to the user. Search engines like kagi.com are the future. You'll give the AI your Kagi API key and that'll be it. You won't even need cloud-based AI for that kind of thing! Tiny, local models trained for perform…

> AI is going to kill the traditional (free) search engine Yes, this has been issue for for many content creators. I predict that because of this, a lot of internet will get behind a paywall. I run one, so I hope the future is bright, but overall this is very bad for the internet because it was never intended to be used this way. Sure, it will be great for users to save unimaginable amount of time searching manually,…

I worry about this too. Some thoughts on how we plan to tackle this challenge are here: https://parallel.ai/about
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