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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

#31

Post by esafak »

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 me to resize the columns. Also, it missed the opportunity to tell me that some shells can replicate jq's functionality. Finally, it would have to be faster to be a daily driver. At this speed, it is something I would reserve for backup, for when the workhorse fails. Which means I would not want to pay $49/month.

Hope that helps. Interesting idea.

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

#32

Post by joshstrange »

I think it might be a good idea to give some kind of indication that work is being done in the background (or perhaps mine stalled out?).

The initial search/experience is good but then I got dumped here [0] and it's not clear to me if things are still happening or if it broke (it's been at least 5 min with no UI updates.

I can't see the full results yet but this is very interesting and a task I ask OpenAI's Deep Research to attempt periodically. It makes a good show of doing the work but the results are not great IMHO (for asking it generate lists/tables of data like this). I can see this tool being incredibly useful for lead generation (how I am testing it out).

[0] https://cs.joshstrange.com/dySqK1mb

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

#33

Post by willbryk »

twostorytower wrote: post #24

Congrats on the launch! Given you were in YC S21, when AI was much more under the radar, did you recently pivot? I'm guessing it wasn't a 4 year road to launch.

Not a pivot - Websets is just a new product!

Mission of Exa has always been to build much better web search. The evolution has been:

- 2022: Consumer-facing embeddings search (back when we were known as Metaphor)

- 2023: Web search for AIs - once the AI ecosystem heated up, we made a business out of web search + crawling API. This is still our primary business.

- Now: Websets, a useful product built on top of our search tech

If you're curious, our company right now is fully devoted to:

1. Dramatically improving Websets quality

2. Building the best general search engine in the world

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

#35

Post by willbryk »

dbuxton wrote: post #4

Hey! Congrats on the launch. I just signed up for a trial account and I’m pretty impressed with the search API (haven’t used websets yet but looks cool). Our experimental use case is enabling quick and dirty integration of web-based docs into an employee service agentic chatbot - lots of the questions are around “how do I max out my 401k”, which connects to internal information, but some are more like “how do I link…

By cruft cleaner, do you mean cleaning the HTML well? Right now, we do 2 things to help with that, a pretty robust parsing stack as well as a "summaries" feature that returns an LLM-generated query-biased text output for every webpage returned.

If something else though, curious.

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

#36

Post by willbryk »

saadatq wrote: post #27

This looks really great. And also how “internal” business intelligence/operations tools should work. search first to find relevant artifacts - “top 10 customers in AMEA”, followed by agentic verification and enrichment. Congrats on the launch!

Thanks! Let us know how you find it :)

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

#38

Post by willbryk »

mkrishnan wrote: post #6

Congratulations! great idea, some issues I noticed, I searched "lucid air touring models available for sale Under 20,000 miles" and tried to add column "sale price", but did get the price details, same for other cars as well

Hm! I'll try this out. Sometimes info like price are hard to parse out because the data may be on ecommerce-style websites that have many crawling protections

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

#39

Post by willbryk »

esafak wrote: 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 :)

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

#40

Post by willbryk »

srameshc wrote: post #17

So the crawlers are feeding to database and also something is classifying the data stream and organizing the data and everything is open as a very large dataset. This is an interesting concept.

Yup exactly! And we expose this as a regular search API as well as in the Websets product.
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