How to choose: API Search Engine

How to choose a search API in five steps

1. Name the job. Decide whether you need a results list, passages, full pages or a finished answer.
2. Set the accuracy bar. If a wrong claim is costly, prefer an API that returns quotes you can check against the source text.
3. Check the billing unit and the rate limit. Work out the cost of one real task, including retries and page reads, and confirm the queries-per-second cap fits your agent.
4. Confirm coverage. Ask whether the index covers your topic, languages and source types, such as filings, government data or academic work.
5. Read the terms. Check how results can be stored, cached and displayed, and whether your use case is allowed.

Test it yourself with a pilot

Build a fixed set of real queries from your product, with the answer you expect for each. Run every candidate API against the same set, using the same model and the same prompt. Score three things: whether the answer is right, whether each citation supports its claim, and what one completed answer costs end to end.

Then compare your results with the published benchmarks. A vendor benchmark shows what a provider can do on the test it chose. Your pilot shows what it does on your work, and that is the number to act on.

Keep the pilot small enough that one person can run it. Log every query, answer and cost in one shared sheet so the team can compare the results.

Decide in advance which result would change your choice. Name the score or cost ceiling that would make you switch providers, so the pilot ends with a decision rather than a debate.

Continue this reading path

• Resource directory
• API Search Engine

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