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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

#51

Post by Mockapapella »

Honestly I thought you guys had launched already (and didn't know you were a part of YC), been aware of you guys for years now it seems. Congrats on the launch! Hope the twitter issues aren't causing you guys too many problems.

Normally I'd send this as a DM or email, but I think it could be useful for others to learn about how to use your service/the limitations of it. A couple weeks ago I made a search for:

    In early 2023, Andrej Karpathy said something like "large training runs are a good test of the overall health of the network." Something something resilience as well I think. I need you to find it.
Unfortunately it wasn't able to find it, but it was either in a tweet or a really long presentation, neither of which are good targets for search. It was around the same time that this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3b-JASoPi0) video was posted, like within a couple weeks before or after. How could I have improved my query? Does exa work over videos?

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

#52

Post by mfrye0 »

Congrats on the launch!

How do you dedupe entities, like companies and people? I've noticed ChatGPT tends to provide "great" results when asking about different entities, but in reality it just groups similar sounding entities together in its answer.

For example, I asked ChatGPT about a well known startup. It gave me a confident answer about how much they raised, their current status, etc. When looking at the 3 sources they cited though, it was actually 3 different companies that all had similar sounding names that it just grouped together to form its answer.

Basically, how do I trust the output of your system?

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

#53

Post by jackienotchan »

AI crawlers have lead to a big surge in scraping/crawling activity on the web, and many don't use proper user agents and don't stick to any scraping best practices that the industry has developed over the past two decades (robots.txt, rate limits). This comes with negative side effects for website owners (costs, downtime, etc.), as repeatedly reported on HN (and experienced myself).

Do you have any built-in features that address these issues?

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

#54

Post by hubraumhugo »

I think you guys nailed the "selling shovels during a gold rush" as the biggest issue with LLMs currently is their reliability/hallucinations, not their capabilities. If I can use websets to back up LLM responses through your API, that's super useful.

Since you were part of YC 21, could you share a bit about your pivots/product iterations you went through over the last 4 years?

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

#55

Post by liam-hinzman »

mfrye0 wrote: post #52

Congrats on the launch! How do you dedupe entities, like companies and people? I've noticed ChatGPT tends to provide "great" results when asking about different entities, but in reality it just groups similar sounding entities together in its answer. For example, I asked ChatGPT about a well known startup. It gave me a confident answer about how much they raised, their current status, etc. When looking at the 3 sourc…

We find supporting references when evaluating the search criteria / enrichments of each result, and you can view these citations

https://imgur.com/dsGK5dS

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

#56

Post by willbryk »

hubraumhugo wrote: post #54

I think you guys nailed the "selling shovels during a gold rush" as the biggest issue with LLMs currently is their reliability/hallucinations, not their capabilities. If I can use websets to back up LLM responses through your API, that's super useful. Since you were part of YC 21, could you share a bit about your pivots/product iterations you went through over the last 4 years?

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

#57

Post by antoniojtorres »

jackienotchan wrote: post #53

AI crawlers have lead to a big surge in scraping/crawling activity on the web, and many don't use proper user agents and don't stick to any scraping best practices that the industry has developed over the past two decades (robots.txt, rate limits). This comes with negative side effects for website owners (costs, downtime, etc.), as repeatedly reported on HN (and experienced myself). Do you have any built-in features…

I work in the adtech ad verification space and this is very true. the surge in content scraping has made things very very hard in some instances. I can’t really fault the website owners either.

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

#59

Post by colkassad »

willbryk wrote: post #30
mbeavitt wrote: post #3

This is super cool. You provide examples of “searches that work” - can you give an idea of the limitations here? What kind of searches won’t work?

We're a startup, so most of our resources go towards use cases that our users care most about. So the search should work best for - people, companies, papers, high quality written content (e.g., blogs, news). It should work well at more than just those (try Github repo search, it's quite good :D), but those are the best supported. Types of searches Websets doesn't currently do well at: - products (e.g., ecommerce sit…

Geospatial data would be great. This stuff is notoriously annoying to search for. For example:

"Give me a list of free imagery service endpoints I can use in a maplibre style sheet. Include information such as name, description, service endpoint, service type, extent (global/regional)."

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

#60

Post by mfrye0 »

liam-hinzman wrote: post #55
mfrye0 wrote: post #52

Congrats on the launch! How do you dedupe entities, like companies and people? I've noticed ChatGPT tends to provide "great" results when asking about different entities, but in reality it just groups similar sounding entities together in its answer. For example, I asked ChatGPT about a well known startup. It gave me a confident answer about how much they raised, their current status, etc. When looking at the 3 sourc…

We find supporting references when evaluating the search criteria / enrichments of each result, and you can view these citations https://imgur.com/dsGK5dS

Right, I saw that. ChatGPT does the same.

My question is how you can confirm the entity you're referencing in each source is actually the entity you're looking for?

An example I ran into recently is Vast (https://www.vastspace.com/). There are a number of other notable startups named Vast (https://vast.ai/, https://www.vastdata.com/).

I understand Clay, which your Websets product is clearly inspired by, does a fair amount of matching based on domain name or LinkedIn url.

If Websets is doing fuzzy or naive matching, that's okay. I'm just trying to understand the limitations and potential uses cases of your current system.

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