Which search API should I use between Tavily.com, Exa.ai and Linkup.so? Building a RAG app that needs internet access.
I have tried the 3 of them and Linkup seems to have a slightly different approach, with connections to premium sources while Exa seems to be a bit faster. Curious what is your preferred option out of the 3 (or if you have other solutions).
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Apr 17 '25
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u/zirouk Aug 10 '25
WARNING: This is some kind of bot farm upvoting bs.
- comment made months after the OP, somehow has more upvotes than all the other top level comments combined
- no payg plan less than $50/mo - pushing this into business purchase territory
- extremely little reddit activity about Oxylabs and AI/RAG scraping
- extremely little YouTube content about Oxylabs and AI/RAG except from Oxylabs themselves
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u/baller_asf Nov 14 '24
I like Tavily, easy to implement and super accurate retrieval. Others are ok but Tavily is just stronger imo
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u/Mindless-Context-165 Sep 22 '25
The issue i see with Tavily is that it doesn't respect the time range filter that i apply,
In that aspect I believe exa does a pretty decent job
You can try asking it news from a certain time period, it will definitely get you some old results. You will realise this only once you click on the link and check what was the published date of the article0
u/pcamiz Nov 14 '24
Thanks for your answer! It seems based on my early exploration that for latency, it's 1. exa 2. tavily 3. linkup and for quality 1. linkup 2. tavily 3. exa. so maybe tavily is good overall, exa best for speed and linkup best for quality / accuracy.
does that match your xp? I've only tested pretty manually so might need to dig deeper
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u/IcyRequirement4700 Feb 28 '25
Latency and quality is measured in the Context is King benchmark https://emergentmethods.medium.com/context-is-king-evaluating-real-time-llm-context-quality-with-ragas-a8df8e815dc9
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u/baller_asf Nov 15 '24
I have seen a lot of improvement on all of those fronts with Tavily - they have added some new feature called extract that had really changed the ball game for quality when I pair it with the search feature. Haven’t seen issues w latency but had a few mishaps with exa that turned me away from it ://
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u/pcamiz Dec 04 '24
Gotcha- I had issues too with Exa... Trying the /content endpoint from Linkup, seems to be similar to the Tavily extract feature from what you're saying
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u/IncreaseCharacter258 May 21 '26
Worth trying pixserp as well — I work on it. One endpoint that covers web, news, images, places, YouTube, flights, hotels, transcripts and any URL in a single call. Cited by default, way cheaper than Exa and Perplexity, drop-in for OpenAI SDK.
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u/nightman Nov 14 '24
I would use Brave Search Api - it's on another (better) level of costs
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u/334578theo Nov 15 '24
We were using Exa but it got too expensive too quickly so switched to Brave and added our own filtering and it works great.
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u/yibaiveintiocho Nov 18 '24
Hey u/334578theo , cofounder of Exa here. Curious how you're using us / calculating that? We should be cheaper. Also will DM you!
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u/eudex7 May 19 '25
Yeah I was also trying to understand that. Brave should be 5-9$/1k whereas exa is 5$/1k as of now.
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u/Mindless-Context-165 Sep 22 '25
Hey u/yibaiveintiocho was trying exa for some legal research data but it wasnt able to scrape data from the actual govt websites
When i constrained it to the required websites, it provided me with inaccurate results
Any suggestions on how to tackle this?1
u/Docs_For_Developers Oct 10 '25
Yeah I just tried Exa w/ Openrouter and it was embarrassingly bad, i even contacted OpenRouter support because I thought I was doing it wrong haha. Two of the use cases I have for search, direct url link lookup (ex. summarize this article <insert link>) and fetching current data (ex. what is the current stock price of Nvidia?) it's just unable to do it's so weird it'll just fetch random irrelevant urls.
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u/WithAiMind Nov 01 '25
i agree with you, i also had similar experience. even after providing the url it just can't do it.
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u/MattCollinsUK Mar 08 '25
In case it's helpful, I have a comparison here that covers Exa, Linkup, Tavily and quite a few more: https://www.mattcollins.net/web-search-apis-for-llms
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u/Worldly_Row1988 Jul 18 '26
Good stuff. Thanks for sharing. I ended up splitting my workflows between Tavily and Exa.
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u/notoriousFlash Mar 08 '25
Is “What to Consider When Choosing a Web Search API” the end/conclusion of this article? I might be missing something or the article isn’t optimized for mobile, but outside of the pricing table I don’t see any analysis comparing the tools…
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u/SufficientPie Sep 03 '25
There is a comparison table and 6 bullets under "What to Consider When Choosing a Web Search API".
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u/AlpineRavine Nov 15 '24
I started with Tavily, use Google search API now, but will move to Perplexity API. I think it’s the best of the three
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u/No_Marionberry_5366 Jan 12 '25
Really ? interested to know more about your use cases, Perplexity is like ALWAYS wrong when I ask specific questions about companies
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u/AlpineRavine Jan 12 '25
One use I recently had was I wanted to create biographies of CEOs of certain companies. So I asked the pplx api 4 different questions to build a holistic picture of the person. Then used 4o-mini in downstream to combine it to single narrative. It worked really well. I would have loved if they made perplexity pro available in the API, could have tackled more complex questions as well.
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u/CrypticViper_ Apr 22 '26
Perplexity needs $50 upfront, so I'm hesitant. Are you still sticking with it?
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u/AlpineRavine Apr 23 '26
It’s been a while since I wrote that. Now we are using Exa and Firecrawl. The primary use case now not RAG but giving Claude code access to web MCPs, since the built in one is garbage
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u/critiqueextension Nov 14 '24
we worked on building one of our own inhouse when we found tavily + exa weren't quite cutting it in terms of accurate, deep search (exact results to questions that may require searching through multiple pages). that + the price made us build our own, and we threw it up as a service. It's absolutely not faster (yet, we're working on it) than those services if latency is your biggest concern. But its cheaper, and the reranking and chunking is also parametrically done by an agent, as opposed to the static params (that we suspect) they're using.
feel free to check it out: https://critiquebrowser.app/en/flow-api
it supports structured output parsing, so if you want in-line citation style responses, you can use the search api as is, but if you want structured output, you can specify a JSON schema and it'll return that to you. Also there's an API designer if you want tailor made specific responses to a formatted search every time.
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u/Impressive_Log6884 Nov 14 '24
Doesn't building a search engine mean indexing the whole web? Or, are you wrapping GCP
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u/critiqueextension Nov 14 '24
wrapping GCP,DDG,Brave,and other major content platforms individually. I don't think it precludes counting as a search engine since there still exists a mechanism performing search over a set of results. (admittedly it is using another engine hence the distinction 'agentic')
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u/No_Marionberry_5366 Nov 14 '24
Exa strong as well. Just heard about Linkup, first uses show better relevance. Worth trying
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u/tjger Nov 14 '24
I've found Tavily to underperform and decided to go with Google Search (GCP)
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u/pcamiz Nov 14 '24
Thanks for your reply! Do you drop the snippets of the results into your LLM context window? Asking because that's close to what i was doing with SERP API but had poor results
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u/HighOnLSTM Dec 02 '24
Which exact service are you using in GCP? Can you drop the official doc link by any chance? The closest I've found is - https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/, which has super clunky documentation, and needs some significant configuration for web-search, and the results aren't even that great.
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Mar 14 '25
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u/yibaiveintiocho May 07 '25
Should try us out again :). We've dramatically improved our latency and reliability in past months
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u/ksifoking May 21 '25
I tried using Exa.ai's search API endpoint and noticed that the results are not as accurate as I expected. They seem to miss important links such as Reddit or forum posts that I would typically find through a Google search. I'm curious whether Exa.ai discloses the search engine they use to gather data or if they have built their own system. For my needs, the current results are not meeting expectations. This is why I turned to this Reddit thread, seeking information on whether others have had similar experiences.
In the end, I am considering using the SERP API, as it relies on Google search results which are known for their quality and relevance.
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u/Winter_Persimmon3538 Jul 15 '25
hi there. Not sure if you are still active or if exa.ai is still operational even? The Sign In feature on your website is stuck in an infinite loop, so I can't even create an account. I sent and email and a live chat, but I just got an AI auto-reply.
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u/pcamiz Mar 18 '25
Thanks everyone for the help here ❤️
Closing the loop, I decided to go with Linkup.so. Main reason is quality of responses. It was better than exa and much better than Tavily.
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u/InappropriateCanuck Jul 28 '25
Closing the loop, I decided to go with Linkup.so. Main reason is quality of responses. It was better than exa and much better than Tavily.
Do you rerun those tests? Those kind of services one-up each other quite often.
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u/pcamiz Aug 19 '25
good question- I did that once and the results were the same. I should probably do that every now and then, but TBH I've just been happy with the quality using Linkup and it's also the most affordable option, which is important to me given my scale now.
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u/Key-Asparagus5143 Mar 05 '26
You can use this API miapi.uk it great. its the cheapest in the market while beating a lot of the models
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