Search API
A programming interface that provides web search capabilities to applications or agents, typically returning ranked summaries of search results, used for retrieval-augmented generation and information acquisition by agents.
Timeline (last 90 days)
Under the data in this article, the second provider has the largest marginal hit contribution, so serial fallback-on-miss can capture most of the benefit at lower cost.
When using only the single best-performing search API, the hit rate was 68%.
When using three search APIs, the hit rate was about 80%.
When using all 12 search APIs, the hit rate was 84%.
Randomly selecting two search API providers to form a fallback combination also achieved a hit rate of 68%, on par with the best-performing single provider.
If search API providers fail on different queries due to differing index sources, crawling strategies, and ranking algorithms, then failure events are approximately independent, and the combined joint hit rate approaches 1-(1-p)^n.
In the test, 16% of queries had no answer appearing across all 12 providers, and this portion of failures is unrelated to provider selection.
TinyFish is a provider of web retrieval infrastructure that recently made its search capability free.
All Facts (8)
Under the data in this article, the second provider has the largest marginal hit contribution, so serial fallback-on-miss can capture most of the benefit at lower cost.
50%UnverifiedWhen using only the single best-performing search API, the hit rate was 68%.
50%UnverifiedWhen using three search APIs, the hit rate was about 80%.
50%UnverifiedWhen using all 12 search APIs, the hit rate was 84%.
50%UnverifiedRandomly selecting two search API providers to form a fallback combination also achieved a hit rate of 68%, on par with the best-performing single provider.
50%UnverifiedIf search API providers fail on different queries due to differing index sources, crawling strategies, and ranking algorithms, then failure events are approximately independent, and the combined joint hit rate approaches 1-(1-p)^n.
50%UnverifiedIn the test, 16% of queries had no answer appearing across all 12 providers, and this portion of failures is unrelated to provider selection.
50%UnverifiedTinyFish is a provider of web retrieval infrastructure that recently made its search capability free.
50%