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Web search on the Anthropic API

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Re: Web search on the Anthropic API

#21

Post by jsnell »

jarbus wrote: post #16

Is search really that costly to run? $10/1000 searches seems really pricey. I'm wondering if these costs will come down in a few years.

Yes.

The Bing Search API is priced at $15/1k queries in the cheapest tier, Brave API is $9 at the non-toy tier, Google's pricing for a general search API is unknown but their Search grounding in Gemini costs $35/1k queries.

Search API prices have been going up, not down, over time. The opposite of LLMs, which have gotten 1000x cheaper over the last two years.

Re: Web search on the Anthropic API

#22

Post by miohtama »

istjohn wrote: post #19
minimaxir wrote: post #3

The web search functionality is also available in the backend Workbench (click the wrench Tools icon) https://console.anthropic.com/workbench/ The API request notably includes the exact text it cites from its sources ( https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/tool-us... ), which is nifty. Cost-wise it's interesting. $10/1000 queries is much cheaper for heavy use than Google's Gemini (1500 free per day the…

Well also Google has put onerous conditions on their service: - If you show users text generated by Gemini using Google Search (grounded Gemini), you must display a provided widget with suggested search terms that links directly to Google Search results on google.com. - You may not modify the text generated by grounded Gemini before displaying it to your users. - You may not store grounded responses more than 30 days…

Google obviously does not want to cannibalise their golden goose. However it's inevitable that Google search will start to suffer because people need it less and less with LLMs.

Re: Web search on the Anthropic API

#23

Post by AznHisoka »

jarbus wrote: post #16

Is search really that costly to run? $10/1000 searches seems really pricey. I'm wondering if these costs will come down in a few years.

If you want an unofficial API, most data providers usually charge $4/1000 queries or so. By unofficial, I mean they just scrape whats in Google and return that to you. So thats the benchmark I use, which means the cost here is around 2x that.

As far as I know, the pricing really hasnt gone down over the years. If anything it has gone up because Google is increasingly making it harder for these providers

Re: Web search on the Anthropic API

#24

Post by AznHisoka »

tuyguntn wrote: post #18
jarbus wrote: post #16

Is search really that costly to run? $10/1000 searches seems really pricey. I'm wondering if these costs will come down in a few years.

they will come down, because up until recently consumers were not paying directly for searches, with the LLM which has a cutoff date in the past and hallucinations, search got popular paid API. Popularity will grow even more, hence competition will increase and prices will change eventually

I dont think that will be true. What competition? Google, Bing, and.. Kagi? (And only one of those have a far superior index/algo than the others)

Re: Web search on the Anthropic API

#25

Post by minimaxir »

istjohn wrote: post #20
simonw wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but are there any restrictions on what I can do with them? Google Gemini has some: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/grounding/search-sugge... OpenAI has some rules too: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/tools-web-search#out... > "When displaying web results or information contained in web results to end users, inline citations must be made clearly visible and clickable in your user interface." I'm u…

Google's restrictions are outlandish: "[You] will not modify, or intersperse any other content with, the Grounded Results or Search Suggestions..."

The API response actually contains the full HTML to include.

Re: Web search on the Anthropic API

#26

Post by simonw »

minimaxir wrote: post #25
istjohn wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's restrictions are outlandish: "[You] will not modify, or intersperse any other content with, the Grounded Results or Search Suggestions..."

The API response actually contains the full HTML to include.

I'm not quite sure how I should handle that in my CLI tool!

Re: Web search on the Anthropic API

#27

Post by Manouchehri »

AznHisoka wrote: post #23
jarbus wrote: post #16

Is search really that costly to run? $10/1000 searches seems really pricey. I'm wondering if these costs will come down in a few years.

If you want an unofficial API, most data providers usually charge $4/1000 queries or so. By unofficial, I mean they just scrape whats in Google and return that to you. So thats the benchmark I use, which means the cost here is around 2x that. As far as I know, the pricing really hasnt gone down over the years. If anything it has gone up because Google is increasingly making it harder for these providers

That seems expensive.

For 100 results per query, serper.dev is $2/1000 queries and Bright Data is $1.5/1000 queries.

Re: Web search on the Anthropic API

#28

Post by OxfordOutlander »

jarbus wrote: post #16

Is search really that costly to run? $10/1000 searches seems really pricey. I'm wondering if these costs will come down in a few years.

Openai search mode is $30-50 per 1000 depending on low-high context

Gemini is $30/1000

So Anthropic is actually the cheapest.

For context, exa is $5 / 1000.

Re: Web search on the Anthropic API

#29

Post by peterldowns »

cmogni1 wrote: post #6

I think the most interesting thing to me is they have multi-hop search & query refinement built in based on prior context/searches. I'm curious how well this works. I've built a lot of LLM applications with web browsing in it. Allow/block lists are easy to implement with most web search APIs, but multi-hop gets really hairy (and expensive) to do well because it usually requires context from the URLs themselves. The t…

> For example, writing an article about the side effects of Accutane should err on the side of pulling in research articles first for higher quality information and not blog posts.

Interesting, I'm taking isotretinoin right now and I've found it's more interesting and useful to me to read "real" experiences (from reddit and blogs) than research papers.

Re: Web search on the Anthropic API

#30

Post by jbellis »

Manouchehri wrote: post #27
AznHisoka wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want an unofficial API, most data providers usually charge $4/1000 queries or so. By unofficial, I mean they just scrape whats in Google and return that to you. So thats the benchmark I use, which means the cost here is around 2x that. As far as I know, the pricing really hasnt gone down over the years. If anything it has gone up because Google is increasingly making it harder for these providers

That seems expensive. For 100 results per query, serper.dev is $2/1000 queries and Bright Data is $1.5/1000 queries.

I'm not sure that's correct -- the first party APIs are priced per query but BD is per 1k results. Not immediately obvious what they count as a "result" tho.
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