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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#81

Post by foobahhhhh »

Very nice! Like a Databricks for Google, or perhaps think of it as Google backend as a service (at least their AI like backend not the main search)

It disrupts anyone who merely does one thing this does. E.g. contact building app can be done by this. I imagine many "wrapper" apps can be built on this.

I am serious though. It felt like using databricks a little bit, obviously without all the functionality but that will come.

I'm bullish! Modulo competition. Someone who does this makes their billion.

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

#83

Post by liam-hinzman »

AznHisoka wrote: post #71

I searched for 'data providers that start with the letter R that sell job postings data', and it's been 15 minutes and it barely verified the first row. But if it filtered it first to "start with the letter R", it would only have to look at perhaps 5% of the results it's trying to verify! So it's doing needless verification of results that will be thrown out by another filter that should've been applied first!

We were down for a bit! Ran your search, got 8 matches after analyzing 100 results. Took 40 seconds for the first match, and another 80 seconds for the other matches.

We use an agentic search planner that adapts its search strategy as matches are found, but it could be smarter with substrings.

https://websets.exa.ai/cmad36arq009fl30i4dvkc7wn

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

#84

Post by liam-hinzman »

byearthithatius wrote: post #70

I was so excited for this, but sadly it doesn't work at all, not even UI feedback for the error:( The UI showed literally no change. So I checked and the console shows: ``` Try: 14 Not Found 681-7df1b139fa2dc9f0.js:14:3379 Try: 15 Not Found 681-7df1b139fa2dc9f0.js:14:3379 Try: 16 Not Found 681-7df1b139fa2dc9f0.js:14:3379 Try: 17 Not Found 681-7df1b139fa2dc9f0.js:14:3379 Try: 18 Not Found 681-7df1b139fa2dc9f0.js:14:33…

We were down for a bit, back up now! Lmk how the search quality turns out for you

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

#85

Post by liam-hinzman »

whoisjuan wrote: post #78

Did you guys change the pricing of Exa? When I checked this a year or so ago, I might have gotten the impression that it was cheaper. Now, it costs the same as what Perplexity charges for search-grounded queries, which is the same as Google charges for Gemini queries with search. So basically, one player sets a price, and everyone is anchored on that as the pricing for the entire category? I'm just genuinely interest…

We charge $5 per 1000 requests with our search and answer endpoints.

Perplexity charges the same on their lowest tier model, and three times as much for their more expensive models.

Gemini charges $35 per 1000 requests.

https://exa.ai/pricing

https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/pricing

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing

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

#87

Post by liam-hinzman »

joshstrange wrote: post #32

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 Rese…

We were down for a bit, sorry about that. Ran your search for you, and found 25 results in ~2 minutes.

“List of food festivals on the east coast specializing in small dishes or encourages sampling from multiple vendors. features more than 20 vendors”

https://websets.exa.ai/cmad3sonh001zhx0i1h7t692f

btw I like how you host screenshots on your personal website

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

#88

Post by theamk »

gertlex wrote: post #79
theamk wrote: post #69

Did my favorite search query, and the result were pretty bad, as expected: "robotics servo motors with two-directional control for under $100" 1. https://mjbots.com/ - their motor are $1369. FAIL. 2. https://www.pololu.com/ - this is huge store, but they do have some motors like that. Pass, but wish it linked to specific page and not top top-level one. 3. dh-robotics.com - no prices, but some products on open market…

Curious: what is an example of a robotics servo motor with one-directional control? My experience around such started with pwm hobby servos, includes dynamixels, and I've worked with larger stuff using harmonic drive gearboxes. Can't recall encountering a "servo" that is one-directional.

PWM-controlled hobby servo (1-2mS pulse evert 20mS or so) is the one-directional control I had in mind. When you are under $100 range a surprising number of servos use the same simple 1-wire protocol, even large-ish 150 kg-cm / 100W units.

Dynamixels are two-way, and they are an exact thing I'd wanted to see in search results.

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

#90

Post by henryway »

forthwall wrote: post #89

Really novel idea but - I think there's a bug for the first example, when I land on the websets page, it searches "Engineers with startup experience based in california" but whats returned are a bunch of tennis websites

Perhaps the word “set” is difficult to disambiguate between web sets and tennis sets.
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