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).
So what is CF providing here? Maybe some free credits to entice us to use their router? No, not that either ("billed to your AI Gateway credits"). Maybe a comparison of which agent search yields the best results? Nope.
It's a crappy proxy- probably less efficient and more volatile than hitting the agent API directly.
This is only if I understand the product correctly (which I admittedly skimmed) due to the sheer number of screeching vibey nothingburgers coming out of CF over the past month.
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
But does CloudFlare itself commit to zero data retention? If not, this isn’t too meaningful.
https://github.com/hbmartin/agent-web-search
So this gives a unified search experience without adding another cloud hop and dependency.