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

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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UI is perfect for my phone. Love the information density

Interesting. I haven't tried on my phone. Perhaps my iPad resolution falls in the middle of a switch between two different layouts and it's trying to use the desktop version.

I’ll add better support for tablet breakpoints in an hour, thanks for flagging!

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

#132
post #97

> The second is that LLMs provide the last-mile intelligence needed to verify every result. Each result and piece of data is backed with supporting references that we used to validate that the result is actually a match for your search criteria. Evals on this would be great to benchmark the gap between using websets versus a generic web search tool. Otherwise to a developer, it's just marketing.

https://exa.ai/blog/websets-evals

Can you open source the code used to produce the evals?

Would love to see how its setup: the questions you linked to a ChatGPT chat, but the system prompt, tool calls would all be useful.

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

#133
post #31

I suggest caching and enabling the sharing of results. I am not signed in so I don't know if that is feature I am missing. I searched for "alternatives to jq with a functional API" and one of the criteria it came up with was "Provides technical details or comparisons relevant to the alternatives" but the table only listed the repo's url and description. And the description was truncated with ellipses with no way for…

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah we'd love to make the product as accessible and cheap as possible, but as of state of AI costs of 2025, it's a very expensive product to run and so we have it login gated. If you're willing to log in though, you'll find a lot of the features that you're mentioning :)

Websets are cool - I remember that 2 decades ago there was a project in Google Labs that tried to return google search results as 'objects' x 'properties' but it never left their research sandbox (cannot remember project's name unfortunately).

Searches that give tabular results can be cheap if you already have structured datasets (extracted from crawled data), so LLM can simply convert the user's natural language query to SQL query (or SQL-like query) which can be cost-efficiently executed - say, with DuckDB. This approach can also give more correct results - as values in these structured datasets can be validated in the background, not as an individual 'deep research' task.

I understand that this is another kind of search service, however, this can be a way to offer free/cheap searches for users who don't need expensive individual research tasks.

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

#134
I was trying to submit some feedback using your "Feedback" button on the top right, but got an error when trying to submit it :(

Anyway, the model used doesn't seem to be very good, it did not understand a basic "OR" criteria. I asked for a list of companies with an office in Toronto that are involved in hardware development such as custom silicon, robotics, satellites or drones. It completely misunderstood the "or" part (and the "such as" part). E.g. I see many robotics companies marked as a "Miss" because they only do robotics but not any of the other things on my list.

Overall though I love the idea, I would pay for your service (on a pay-as-you-go per-query basis) if the underlying model was smart enough for me to actually rely on the results.

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

#135
I searched for series b startups hiring for data analyst roles in the Bay Area for a friend. It returned lots of bigger companies that I didn’t want included. I also had no luck trying to figure out how to copy paste or share the results (using iPhone). Overall though I think this is a great idea and wish you the best!

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's now https://github.com/eza-community/eza as from the readme

Upvoted for your rational stance and thanks for pointing that out. I could have expressed myself in a better way anyways.

Don't beat yourself over it. Sure you could, but looking at the state of the world today, losing your mind once and again is an appropriate reaction.
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