5 ms·

The Parallel Search API

123 points by lukaslevert 11mo ago

BinaryIgor 11mo ago
Interesting, but I'm not totally convinced that searching for LLMs is different than for us (humans). In the end, we both want to get information that's relevant to our query (intent). Besides, I wonder whether there will be able to convince big players like OpenAI to use them, instead of Google Search with its proven record :)
- namegulf 11mo ago
  You're right, at the end the final end user is human. The major difference is the how the data is structured for consumption.
- paragagrawal 11mo ago
  Does this help? https://x.com/paraga/status/1986480529701806324 https://x.com/paraga/status/1986480529701806324
nahnahno 11mo ago
The fact that GPT-4.1 was the judge does not convince of the validity of the bench.
- tacoooooooo 11mo ago
  it's an odd choice. I'd be curious why they picked that. it's not the cheapest, most expensive, best, or worst. It does have a relatively large context window, and ime is very good at format adherence
  - lukaslevert 11mo ago
    You may be looking at our first benchmarks on the homepage— the latest ones for the Search API were conducted against GPT-5: https://parallel.ai/blog/introducing-parallel-search https://parallel.ai/blog/introducing-parallel-search
- ripped_britches 11mo ago
  It’s probably just that they started before gpt 5 was released. It’s a good judge.
hartator 11mo ago
Congrats on the launch!
aabhay 11mo ago
The latency of 5s for the basic tier search request is very confusing to me. Is that 5s per request or 5s per 1k requests? If it is indeed 5s per request that seems like a deal breaker
- pegasus 11mo ago
  This is a search agent available in the cloud. The site mentions that they doesn't optimize for being "done in milliseconds and as cheaply as possible", and that they do a lot more work like extracting relevant paragraphs and "Single-call resolution for complex queries that normally require multiple search hops" and more. Geared to be consumed by other agents, hence the latency may be tolerable. They have the advantage of running the agent code close to the index so less expensive searches. Basically, this is something in between a simple google search and a "deep research" or at least "thinking" LLM call.
  - paragagrawal 11mo ago
    In agentic use cases, we save on end-to-end latency by spending more time and compute on individual searches. This happens because agents do fewer searches, use fewer tokens, and end up using fewer thinking tokens when using the Parallel Search API.
    - petralithic 11mo ago
      How would the product work if for example I just wanted to get basic information from various websites, such as "how many calories are in a McDonald's hamburger?" I'm creating a product that tracks calories via natural language and I'd want a structured JSON back of calories, grams of fat, protein, carbs etc. What API would I use for that, the Chat API one?
      - lightningflash 11mo ago
        Yes, the chat api is great for this: https://docs.parallel.ai/chat-api/chat-quickstart https://docs.parallel.ai/chat-api/chat-quickstart.
bfeynman 11mo ago
the need for more web search indices is indeed dire given landscape with agents and providers turning into walled gardens means that independent ones are definitely going to be needed, but just seems insurmountable when building actual index is so costly. Maybe just purely pareto efficient of serving 80% of requests or something is good enough.
- paragagrawal 11mo ago
  not insurmountable
apsurd 11mo ago
Human | AI toggle is cool. Obligatory: information-dense format is valuable for humans too! But the entire Internet is propped up by ads so seems we can't have nice things.
- NetOpWibby 11mo ago
  I was pleasantly surprised by this toggle too, very neat.
riskable 11mo ago
I've been saying for quite some time now that AI is going to kill the traditional (free) search engine. This is just another nail in the coffin. When an AI searches google.com for you, the ads never get shown to the user. Search engines like kagi.com are the future. You'll give the AI your Kagi API key and that'll be it. You won't even need cloud-based AI for that kind of thing! Tiny, local models trained for performing searches on behalf of the user will do it instead. Soon your OS will regularly pull down AI model updates just like it pulls down software updates today. Every-day users will have dozens of models that are specialized for all sorts of tasks—like searching the Internet. They won't even know what they're for or what they do. Just like your average Linux user doesn't know what the `polkit` or `avahi-daemon` services do. My hope: This will (eventually) put pressure on hardware manufacturers to include more VRAM in regular PCs/consumer GPUs.
- gethly 11mo ago
  > AI is going to kill the traditional (free) search engine Yes, this has been issue for for many content creators. I predict that because of this, a lot of internet will get behind a paywall. I run one, so I hope the future is bright, but overall this is very bad for the internet because it was never intended to be used this way. Sure, it will be great for users to save unimaginable amount of time searching manually, but if websites lose traffic, well...that is the end of the internet as we know it.
  - NitpickLawyer 11mo ago
    > that is the end of the internet as we know it. Eh. Some of us remember an internet before the free-with-advertising became the norm. In the 90s and early 2000s people were putting stuff online for free with no desire to monetise that content. And it was way more expensive back then to do so. Today you can host a personal blog for less than a coffee. I for one wouldn't mind going back to people sharing stuff for the fun of it, isntead of the myriad of content that's only there to promote/sell/advertise for this and that.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
gm678 11mo ago
Same pricing as Google search APIs, for what it's worth
tcdent 11mo ago
Search accuracy, when used in the context of an agent, is so important because when you are delivered search results which are incorrect, the agent tends to interpret them as fact because they come from a "credible" source. So, this is very much an industry that still has plenty of room for improvement, and I'm excited to see how this product performs.
- barapa 11mo ago
  I don't really understand this. You can and should tell the llm the source of the search results.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
srameshc 11mo ago
I like Parallel and been using it for tests but I am not sure about the terms. > The materials displayed or performed or available on or through our website, including, but not limited to, text, graphics, data, articles, photos, images, illustrations and so forth (all of the foregoing, the “Content”) are protected by copyright and/or other intellectual property laws. You promise to abide by all copyright notices, trademark rules, information, and restrictions contained in any Content you access through our website, and you won’t use, copy, reproduce, modify, translate, publish, broadcast, transmit, distribute, perform, upload, display, license, sell, commercialize or otherwise exploit for any purpose any Content not owned by you, (i) without the prior consent of the owner of that Content or (ii) in a way that violates someone else’s (including Parallel's) rights.
- pegasus 11mo ago
  IANAL but think this is to remind you that fragments of text it returns to you after pulling them from various sites in response to your query are protected by whatever copyright notices might be found on those websites. Seems reasonable to me.
  - dragonwriter 11mo ago
    As it written it makes part of your agreement with Parallels not to use anything provided via the service without the prior consent of the content owner even if it doesn't violate any legal rights to do so. It may merely be poorly written, but I wouldn't rely on that.
ddp26 11mo ago
Hi Parag, congrats on the launch. We'll try this out at FutureSearch. I agree there is a need for such APIs. Using Google or Bing isn't enough, and Exa and Brave haven't clearly solved this yet.
amnigos 11mo ago
Congrats Parag and team on the launch, I am impressed by the quality and latency of Parallel search APIs.
hamasho 11mo ago
> Traditional search engines were built for humans. They rank URLs, assuming someone will click through and navigate to a page. The search engine's job ends at the link. The system optimizes for keywords searches, click-through rates, and page layouts designed for browsing - done in milliseconds and as cheaply as possible. > ... AI search has to solve a different problem: what tokens should go in an agent's context window to help it complete the task? We’re not ranking URLs for humans to click— we’re optimizing context and tokens for models to reason over. I also want a search engine which ranks the results based on how it's useful to reason about, not how it can sell potential ads by invoking false rage or insecurities. And it would be better if unrelated information or fancy gimmicks are removed from the website like Reader View.
- keeganpoppen 11mo ago
  it’s funny because this is literally how Google USED to work. sigh.
davidsainez 11mo ago
Saw this post. clicked on pricing. "Run up to 20,000 requests for free", ok lets try it. sign up for an account. click on playground. try a query -> balance is insufficient. then I clicked on "pricing" tab inside of the dashboard (https://platform.parallel.ai/pricing https://platform.parallel.ai/pricing), no mention of any free requests. I pay for a lot of tools, but patterns like this leave me with a really bad impression.
- nextworddev 11mo ago
  + apps that make it hard to cancel on a self serve basis I tried cancelling Exa (search) and they had me email the support, which they ignored and required a follow up. Then they had the nerves to ask for feedback.
  - Havoc 10mo ago
    In some jurisdictions this is now illegal. e.g. UK Digital Markets, Competition & Consumers Act 2024 https://sintons.co.uk/sintons_i_p/new-laws-protecting-consumers-from-subscription-traps/ https://sintons.co.uk/sintons_i_p/new-laws-protecting-consum...
- kshelat 11mo ago
  hi-this is unexpected. new users should receive free credits. we're looking into the bug. happy to help if you can email support@parallel.ai
  - drewbitt 10mo ago
    I did not get it either. Let me know when new users can trial the product.
kanodiaayush 11mo ago
I'm really excited to try out your deep research apis, the benchmark results look really interesting and the pricing is compelling.
FridgeSeal 11mo ago
Oh look, another company choosing to use <extremely generic, non differentiating term> as their company name. I get that everyone wants to piggyback on the common-ness of words, but it'd be a lot cooler if they _didn't_.
rishabhparikh 11mo ago
Typescript SDK link is broken: https://docs.parallel.ai/resources/typescript-sdk https://docs.parallel.ai/resources/typescript-sdk
- kshelat 11mo ago
  hi -- fixed this. thanks for letting us know.
bakigul 11mo ago
Human and machine choose looks really good
Jotalea 11mo ago
it's pretty interesting how there is a toggle to switch between "human" and "machine" styles for the website, the latter being the same site with the same information, but displayed using a markdown format.
neya 10mo ago
As an aside, because they used the chart legend and the data point the exact same text and icon (just a dot), at first, I thought the accuracy was 0% since I had scrolled half-way through and it took me a good few seconds to see the 47% on the top after scrolling up again. Please always use different illustrations for the legend and the actual datapoint. https://ibb.co/fVb4MVLF https://ibb.co/fVb4MVLF

123 points by lukaslevert 11mo ago

Interesting, but I'm not totally convinced that searching for LLMs is different than for us (humans). In the end, we both want to get information that's relevant to our query (intent). Besides, I wonder whether there will be able to convince big players like OpenAI to use them, instead of Google Search with its proven record :)

namegulf 11mo ago
You're right, at the end the final end user is human. The major difference is the how the data is structured for consumption.
paragagrawal 11mo ago
Does this help? https://x.com/paraga/status/1986480529701806324 https://x.com/paraga/status/1986480529701806324

nahnahno 11mo ago

The fact that GPT-4.1 was the judge does not convince of the validity of the bench.

tacoooooooo 11mo ago
it's an odd choice. I'd be curious why they picked that. it's not the cheapest, most expensive, best, or worst. It does have a relatively large context window, and ime is very good at format adherence
- lukaslevert 11mo ago
  You may be looking at our first benchmarks on the homepage— the latest ones for the Search API were conducted against GPT-5: https://parallel.ai/blog/introducing-parallel-search https://parallel.ai/blog/introducing-parallel-search
ripped_britches 11mo ago
It’s probably just that they started before gpt 5 was released. It’s a good judge.

hartator 11mo ago

Congrats on the launch!

aabhay 11mo ago

The latency of 5s for the basic tier search request is very confusing to me. Is that 5s per request or 5s per 1k requests? If it is indeed 5s per request that seems like a deal breaker

pegasus 11mo ago
This is a search agent available in the cloud. The site mentions that they doesn't optimize for being "done in milliseconds and as cheaply as possible", and that they do a lot more work like extracting relevant paragraphs and "Single-call resolution for complex queries that normally require multiple search hops" and more. Geared to be consumed by other agents, hence the latency may be tolerable. They have the advantage of running the agent code close to the index so less expensive searches. Basically, this is something in between a simple google search and a "deep research" or at least "thinking" LLM call.
- paragagrawal 11mo ago
  In agentic use cases, we save on end-to-end latency by spending more time and compute on individual searches. This happens because agents do fewer searches, use fewer tokens, and end up using fewer thinking tokens when using the Parallel Search API.
  - petralithic 11mo ago
    How would the product work if for example I just wanted to get basic information from various websites, such as "how many calories are in a McDonald's hamburger?" I'm creating a product that tracks calories via natural language and I'd want a structured JSON back of calories, grams of fat, protein, carbs etc. What API would I use for that, the Chat API one?
    - lightningflash 11mo ago
      Yes, the chat api is great for this: https://docs.parallel.ai/chat-api/chat-quickstart https://docs.parallel.ai/chat-api/chat-quickstart.

bfeynman 11mo ago

the need for more web search indices is indeed dire given landscape with agents and providers turning into walled gardens means that independent ones are definitely going to be needed, but just seems insurmountable when building actual index is so costly. Maybe just purely pareto efficient of serving 80% of requests or something is good enough.

paragagrawal 11mo ago
not insurmountable

apsurd 11mo ago

Human | AI toggle is cool. Obligatory: information-dense format is valuable for humans too! But the entire Internet is propped up by ads so seems we can't have nice things.

NetOpWibby 11mo ago
I was pleasantly surprised by this toggle too, very neat.

riskable 11mo ago

I've been saying for quite some time now that AI is going to kill the traditional (free) search engine. This is just another nail in the coffin. When an AI searches google.com for you, the ads never get shown to the user. Search engines like kagi.com are the future. You'll give the AI your Kagi API key and that'll be it. You won't even need cloud-based AI for that kind of thing! Tiny, local models trained for performing searches on behalf of the user will do it instead. Soon your OS will regularly pull down AI model updates just like it pulls down software updates today. Every-day users will have dozens of models that are specialized for all sorts of tasks—like searching the Internet. They won't even know what they're for or what they do. Just like your average Linux user doesn't know what the `polkit` or `avahi-daemon` services do. My hope: This will (eventually) put pressure on hardware manufacturers to include more VRAM in regular PCs/consumer GPUs.

gethly 11mo ago
> AI is going to kill the traditional (free) search engine Yes, this has been issue for for many content creators. I predict that because of this, a lot of internet will get behind a paywall. I run one, so I hope the future is bright, but overall this is very bad for the internet because it was never intended to be used this way. Sure, it will be great for users to save unimaginable amount of time searching manually, but if websites lose traffic, well...that is the end of the internet as we know it.
- NitpickLawyer 11mo ago
  > that is the end of the internet as we know it. Eh. Some of us remember an internet before the free-with-advertising became the norm. In the 90s and early 2000s people were putting stuff online for free with no desire to monetise that content. And it was way more expensive back then to do so. Today you can host a personal blog for less than a coffee. I for one wouldn't mind going back to people sharing stuff for the fun of it, isntead of the myriad of content that's only there to promote/sell/advertise for this and that.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]

gm678 11mo ago

Same pricing as Google search APIs, for what it's worth

tcdent 11mo ago

Search accuracy, when used in the context of an agent, is so important because when you are delivered search results which are incorrect, the agent tends to interpret them as fact because they come from a "credible" source. So, this is very much an industry that still has plenty of room for improvement, and I'm excited to see how this product performs.

barapa 11mo ago
I don't really understand this. You can and should tell the llm the source of the search results.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

srameshc 11mo ago

I like Parallel and been using it for tests but I am not sure about the terms. > The materials displayed or performed or available on or through our website, including, but not limited to, text, graphics, data, articles, photos, images, illustrations and so forth (all of the foregoing, the “Content”) are protected by copyright and/or other intellectual property laws. You promise to abide by all copyright notices, trademark rules, information, and restrictions contained in any Content you access through our website, and you won’t use, copy, reproduce, modify, translate, publish, broadcast, transmit, distribute, perform, upload, display, license, sell, commercialize or otherwise exploit for any purpose any Content not owned by you, (i) without the prior consent of the owner of that Content or (ii) in a way that violates someone else’s (including Parallel's) rights.

pegasus 11mo ago
IANAL but think this is to remind you that fragments of text it returns to you after pulling them from various sites in response to your query are protected by whatever copyright notices might be found on those websites. Seems reasonable to me.
- dragonwriter 11mo ago
  As it written it makes part of your agreement with Parallels not to use anything provided via the service without the prior consent of the content owner even if it doesn't violate any legal rights to do so. It may merely be poorly written, but I wouldn't rely on that.

ddp26 11mo ago

Hi Parag, congrats on the launch. We'll try this out at FutureSearch. I agree there is a need for such APIs. Using Google or Bing isn't enough, and Exa and Brave haven't clearly solved this yet.

amnigos 11mo ago

Congrats Parag and team on the launch, I am impressed by the quality and latency of Parallel search APIs.

hamasho 11mo ago

> Traditional search engines were built for humans. They rank URLs, assuming someone will click through and navigate to a page. The search engine's job ends at the link. The system optimizes for keywords searches, click-through rates, and page layouts designed for browsing - done in milliseconds and as cheaply as possible. > ... AI search has to solve a different problem: what tokens should go in an agent's context window to help it complete the task? We’re not ranking URLs for humans to click— we’re optimizing context and tokens for models to reason over. I also want a search engine which ranks the results based on how it's useful to reason about, not how it can sell potential ads by invoking false rage or insecurities. And it would be better if unrelated information or fancy gimmicks are removed from the website like Reader View.

keeganpoppen 11mo ago
it’s funny because this is literally how Google USED to work. sigh.

davidsainez 11mo ago

Saw this post. clicked on pricing. "Run up to 20,000 requests for free", ok lets try it. sign up for an account. click on playground. try a query -> balance is insufficient. then I clicked on "pricing" tab inside of the dashboard (https://platform.parallel.ai/pricing https://platform.parallel.ai/pricing), no mention of any free requests. I pay for a lot of tools, but patterns like this leave me with a really bad impression.

nextworddev 11mo ago
+ apps that make it hard to cancel on a self serve basis I tried cancelling Exa (search) and they had me email the support, which they ignored and required a follow up. Then they had the nerves to ask for feedback.
- Havoc 10mo ago
  In some jurisdictions this is now illegal. e.g. UK Digital Markets, Competition & Consumers Act 2024 https://sintons.co.uk/sintons_i_p/new-laws-protecting-consumers-from-subscription-traps/ https://sintons.co.uk/sintons_i_p/new-laws-protecting-consum...
kshelat 11mo ago
hi-this is unexpected. new users should receive free credits. we're looking into the bug. happy to help if you can email support@parallel.ai
- drewbitt 10mo ago
  I did not get it either. Let me know when new users can trial the product.

kanodiaayush 11mo ago

I'm really excited to try out your deep research apis, the benchmark results look really interesting and the pricing is compelling.

FridgeSeal 11mo ago

Oh look, another company choosing to use <extremely generic, non differentiating term> as their company name. I get that everyone wants to piggyback on the common-ness of words, but it'd be a lot cooler if they _didn't_.

rishabhparikh 11mo ago

Typescript SDK link is broken: https://docs.parallel.ai/resources/typescript-sdk https://docs.parallel.ai/resources/typescript-sdk

kshelat 11mo ago
hi -- fixed this. thanks for letting us know.

bakigul 11mo ago

Human and machine choose looks really good

Jotalea 11mo ago

it's pretty interesting how there is a toggle to switch between "human" and "machine" styles for the website, the latter being the same site with the same information, but displayed using a markdown format.

neya 10mo ago

As an aside, because they used the chart legend and the data point the exact same text and icon (just a dot), at first, I thought the accuracy was 0% since I had scrolled half-way through and it took me a good few seconds to see the 47% on the top after scrolling up again. Please always use different illustrations for the legend and the actual datapoint. https://ibb.co/fVb4MVLF https://ibb.co/fVb4MVLF