Hey HN! I'm Will, founder of Exa (YC21 - <a href="https://exa.ai">https://exa.ai</a>). Today we're opening up Websets, a search engine that finds massive lists of correct results given complex queries.<p>For example, you can search for:<p>- “software engineers in the Bay Area, with experience in startups and big tech, who know Rust and have published technical content”: <a href="https://websets.exa.ai/cm7ax5bl8003276q689v0dde5">https://websets.exa.ai/cm7ax5bl8003276q689v0dde5</a><p>- “US based healthcare companies, with over 100 employees and a technical founder": <a href="https://websets.exa.ai/cm6lc0dlk004ilecmzej76qx2">https://websets.exa.ai/cm6lc0dlk004ilecmzej76qx2</a><p>- "research paper about ways to avoid the O(n^2) attention problem in transformers, where one of the first author's first name starts with "A","B", "S", or"T", and it was written between 2018 and 2022”: <a href="https://websets.exa.ai/cm7dpml8c001ylnymum4sp11h">https://websets.exa.ai/cm7dpml8c001ylnymum4sp11h</a><p>We built Websets because the web is humanity’s grand collection of all knowledge, and yet it’s totally unorganized. So much valuable content is too hard to find.<p>Traditional search engines, like Google, were built to handle simple keyword queries over the web, not arbitrarily complex SQL. While agentic tools like Deep Research help a bit, they rely on traditional search under the hood and so are similarly bottlenecked.<p>Websets works well because under the hood it uses our in-house embedding-based search engine, trained specifically to handle complex natural language queries. Crucially, Websets uses LLMs to agentically verify each result to ensure correctness. Websets is therefore a test-time compute search engine – it might take minutes or even hours to run. We believe this is a worthwhile sacrifice for high value searches.<p>It’s hard to eval these things, but we did our best and measured that Websets found 20x more results than Google on a set of complex queries and 10x more than Deep Research. These numbers could be arbitrarily higher with more compute per query. Blog post here: <a href="https://exa.ai/blog/websets-evals">https://exa.ai/blog/websets-evals</a><p>While Websets isn’t perfect search yet, it’s a significant first step, and we’re excited to share the first version of the product with you all. We have a free limited tier, and we set up a special HN code for Pro plans. Use PERFECTSEARCH for a two-week free trial of Pro.<p>Can try it here: websets.exa.ai<p>Initial launch video here: <a href="https://x.com/ExaAILabs/status/1864013080944062567" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/ExaAILabs/status/1864013080944062567</a><p>Would love to hear thoughts, feedback, and suggestions! I know HN thinks about search sometimes :)