Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database

Hey HN! We’re Will and Jeff from Exa ( https://exa.ai ). We recently launched Exa Websets, an embeddings-powered search engine designed to return exactly what you’re asking for. You can get precise results for complex queries like “all startups working on open-source developer tools based in SF, founded 2021-2025”. Demo here - https://youtu.be/Unt8hJmCxd4 We started working on Exa because we were frustrated that while LLM state-of-the-art is advancing every week, Google has gotten worse over time. The Internet used to feel like a magical information portal, but it doesn’t feel that way anymore when you’re constantly being pushed towards SEO-optimized clickbait. Websets is a step in the opposite direction. For every search, we perform dozens of embedding searches over Exa’s vector database of the web to find good search candidates, then we run agentic workflows on each result to verify they match exactly what you asked for. Websets results are good for two reasons. First, we train cu ... Read full article.