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Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database

#12

Post by dang »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #8

> We’d love to hear your feedback! I gave it a try and my first search got one match, 14 misses, and all other results are "Verifying..." but it seems stuck (it's been minutes). I can see why you cut your demo (please don't try to hide that it's so slow, especially since you seem to imply to be a Google competitor ("Google has gotten worse over time"), while your product is incomparably slower than Google; it's more…

Edit: the parent has edited their comment several times, which is fine since I invited them to, but the edits obscure the original comment, which was "I gave it a try and my first search got one match, 14 misses, and all other results are "Verifying..." but it seems stuck (it's been minutes). I can see why you cut your demo.".

---

> I can see why you cut your demo.

Can you please edit out swipes, as the site guidelines request (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)? Your comment would be just fine without that bit.

Everyone is familiar with how often software launches run into glitches, and there's no need to be uncharitable.

(If you didn't mean it as a swipe and I just misread you, feel free to edit your comment and I'll delete this when I'm back online.)

Re: Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database

#14

Post by koakuma-chan »

dang wrote: post #12
koakuma-chan wrote: post #8

> We’d love to hear your feedback! I gave it a try and my first search got one match, 14 misses, and all other results are "Verifying..." but it seems stuck (it's been minutes). I can see why you cut your demo (please don't try to hide that it's so slow, especially since you seem to imply to be a Google competitor ("Google has gotten worse over time"), while your product is incomparably slower than Google; it's more…

Edit: the parent has edited their comment several times, which is fine since I invited them to, but the edits obscure the original comment, which was "I gave it a try and my first search got one match, 14 misses, and all other results are "Verifying..." but it seems stuck (it's been minutes). I can see why you cut your demo.". --- > I can see why you cut your demo. Can you please edit out swipes, as the site guidelin…

What is a swipe?

Re: Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database

#15

Post by dang »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #14
dang wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: the parent has edited their comment several times, which is fine since I invited them to, but the edits obscure the original comment, which was "I gave it a try and my first search got one match, 14 misses, and all other results are "Verifying..." but it seems stuck (it's been minutes). I can see why you cut your demo.". --- > I can see why you cut your demo. Can you please edit out swipes, as the site guidelin…

What is a swipe?

A bit of gratuitous nastiness.

Edit: adding "no offense" doesn't change this.

Re: Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database

#16

Post by artembugara »

Will, Jeff, I am a BIG Exa fan. Congrats on finally doing your HN Launch.

I think NewsCatcher (my YC startup) and Exa aren’t direct competitors but we definitely share the same insight — SERP is not the right way to let LLM interact with web. Because it’s literally optimized for humans who can open 10 pages at most.

What we found is that LLMs can sift through 10k+ web pages if you pre-extract all the signals out of it.

But we took a bit of a different angle. Even though we have over 1.5 billion of news stories only in our index we don’t have a solution to sift through as your Websets do (saw your impressive GPU cluster :))

So what we do instead is we do bespoke pipelines for our customers (who are mostly large enterprise/F1000). So we fine-tune LLMs on specific information extraction with very high accuracy.

Our insight: for many enterprises the solution should be either a perfect fit or nothing. And that’s where they’re ok to pay 10-100x for the last mile effort.

P.S. Will, loved your comment on a podcast where you said Exa can be used to find a dating partner.

Re: Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database

#20

Post by 85392_school »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #8

> We’d love to hear your feedback! I gave it a try and my first search got one match, 14 misses, and all other results are "Verifying..." but it seems stuck (it's been minutes). I can see why you cut your demo (please don't try to hide that it's so slow, especially since you seem to imply to be a Google competitor ("Google has gotten worse over time"), while your product is incomparably slower than Google; it's more…

> while your product is incomparably slower than Google

Exa was originally just a search engine. They try to hide it these days to promote Websets, but you can still use it at https://exa.ai/search.

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