Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Web search on the Anthropic API

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 65 posts

Re: Web search on the Anthropic API

#51

Post by camkego »

jwr wrote: post #33
jsnell wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Google's pricing for a general search API As I discovered recently, and much to my surprise, Google does not offer a "general search API", at least not officially. There is a "custom search" API that sounds like web search, but isn't: it offers a subset of the index, which is not immediately apparent. Confusing and misleading labeling there. Bing offers something a bit better, but I recently ended up trying the Kag…

Do you have any references to the point that the Google Custom Search API is for a subset of the regular Google search index?

Re: Web search on the Anthropic API

#52

Post by firtoz »

ColinHayhurst wrote: post #48
jsnell wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Excuse the self-promotion but Mojeek is £3/1,000: https://www.mojeek.com/services/search/web-search-api/

> Can I store data obtained through the API? > You can store results on Business plan and optionally on the Enterprise plan. For other plans, you may store the results for 1 hour to enable caching.

Curious... I can understand that this may be a defensive action, however, feels unenforceable. And in some cases impractical for the user, after seeing this I may keep looking for alternatives for example because it's not clear to me if I have a chat history that has the search results in one of the messages, do I have to have a kind of mechanism to clean those out or something?

Re: Web search on the Anthropic API

#53

Post by minimaxir »

stephpang wrote: post #39
minimaxir wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The query cost is in addition to tokens used. It is unclear if the tokens ingested from the search query count as addititional input tokens. > Web search is available on the Anthropic API for $10 per 1,000 searches, plus standard token costs for search-generated content. > Each web search counts as one use, regardless of the number of results returned. If an error occurs during web search, the web search will not be…

Hi, stephanie from Anthropic here. Thanks for the feedback! We've updated the docs to hopefully make it a little more clear but yes search results do count towards input tokens https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/tool-us...

Thanks for the update!

> Web search results in the conversation are counted as input tokens on subsequent completion requests during the current turn or on subsequent conversation turns.

Yes, that's clear.

Re: Web search on the Anthropic API

#56

Post by lgiordano_notte »

simianwords wrote: post #47
RainbowcityKun wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now, most LLMs with web search grounding are still in Stage 1: they can retrieve content, but their ability to assess quality, trustworthiness, and semantic ranking is still very limited. The LLMs can access the web, but they can't yet understand it in a structured, evaluative way. What’s missing is a layer of engineered relevance modeling, capable of filtering not just based on keywords or citations, but on de…

>Right now, most LLMs with web search grounding are still in Stage 1: they can retrieve content, but their ability to assess quality, trustworthiness, and semantic ranking is still very limited. Why do you think it is limited? Imagine you show a link with details to an LLM and ask it if it is trustworthy or high quality w.r.t the query, why can't it answer it?

Don't think the limit is in what LLMs can evaluate - given the right context, they’re good at assessing quality. The problem is what actually gets retrieved and surfaced in the first place. If the upstream search doesn’t rank high-quality or relevant material well, LLM never sees it. It's not a judgment problem, more of a selection problem.

Re: Web search on the Anthropic API

#57

Post by ricw »

camkego wrote: post #51
jwr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's pricing for a general search API As I discovered recently, and much to my surprise, Google does not offer a "general search API", at least not officially. There is a "custom search" API that sounds like web search, but isn't: it offers a subset of the index, which is not immediately apparent. Confusing and misleading labeling there. Bing offers something a bit better, but I recently ended up trying the Kag…

Do you have any references to the point that the Google Custom Search API is for a subset of the regular Google search index?

No reference here but found this out the hard way too. Google search Ali is Utterly useless in fact and entirely different search results vs using the web. Bing is better. Haven’t tried ksgi yet

Re: Web search on the Anthropic API

#58

Post by Manouchehri »

jbellis wrote: post #30
Manouchehri wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's really poor wording. Bright Data does indeed consider 100 results in a single request to be a single billed "result" event, billed at $1.5/1000 requests.

I always set 100 results per request from Bright Data, and I can see my bill indeed says `SERP Requests: x reqs @ 1.5 $/CPM` (where `x` is the number of requests I've made, not x * 100).

https://docs.brightdata.com/scraping-automation/serp-api/faq...

For serper.dev, they consider 10 results to be 1 "credit", and 20 to 100 results to be 2 "credits". They bill at $50/50,000 credits, so it becomes $1/1000 requests if you are okay with just 10 results per request, or $2/1000 requests if you want 100 results per request.

(Both providers here scale pricing with larger volumes, just trying to compare the easiest price point for those getting started.)

Re: Web search on the Anthropic API

#59

Post by teeklp »

formercoder wrote: post #37
jwr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's pricing for a general search API As I discovered recently, and much to my surprise, Google does not offer a "general search API", at least not officially. There is a "custom search" API that sounds like web search, but isn't: it offers a subset of the index, which is not immediately apparent. Confusing and misleading labeling there. Bing offers something a bit better, but I recently ended up trying the Kag…

I work at Google but not on this. We do offer Gemini with Google Search grounding which is similar to a search API.

How much do you pay people to use this?
Post reply on HN