Comment by alexey-salmin

>Here we are, one layer of indirection more: Ceramic, Exa, Linkup. Who knows what they use. If you told me that those 3 build and maintain their own index, I'd first question whether that was true, and if it is, I would question whether it was any good (relative to Google/Bing/Brave).

Hi! Exa Head of Index here. We certainly do have our own index and it's one of the biggest among the independent players (i.e. not Google and Bing, which by the way closed off their official search APIs). [1]

Regarding the quality: search is a multi-dimensional problem, you can be better on one set of queries and worse on the other. There are tons of benchmarks in the industry, all the players in the AI search market are fighting very hard to climb to the top, updates are shared every week.

We track dozens of use cases and run evals continuously, we perform well on all the verticals we optimize for. Not only we top the ranking on e.g. financial queries, but also Claude with Exa search performs better that Claude with native search -- as measured by independent observers [2]. This means that the underlying search is materially better for the outcome, it's not just how we evaluate the search itself.

[1] https://lnkd.in/p/e9u3dyEG [2] https://lnkd.in/p/enYe4h7u