🚧 This prototype is actively under construction. 🚧   Please provide feedback at github/danielsgriffin/SearchRights/issues or via email to daniel.griffin@berkeley.edu.

Category: Standards & Openness

Criteria: Is there an API for search?

This table is optimized for larger screens. Rotate your device to landscape mode for the best experience.

Andi Search Metaphor Perplexity AI Phind You.com
Is there an API for search?
Searching by API may better support evaluations of the search results and the development of modifications or extensions building on or with the search system.

We do not currently evaluate the performance of the API or restrictions on access. You.com, for instance, says this:
If you are interested in being an early access partner please email api@you.com with your use case, background, and expected daily load.
Other search engines that provide some form of API include the Brave Search API, Google (through their Programmable Search Engine's Custom Search JSON API), Microsoft's Bing Web Search API, and the Yandex Search API.

You can also get programmatic or tool-based access to web search results from many third party providers that scrape search results from search engines. For example, academic researchers have conducted research using data from SerpAPI (Zade et al., 2022 ) and Ahrefs (Williams & Carley, 2023).
No
Yes

Metaphor announced beta access to their search API on Apr 21, 2023. It is now generally available at platform.metaphor.systems
No

Perplexity provides an API for interacting with open-source LLMs (see Oct 4, 2023 blogpost: "Introducing pplx-api". While not a search API, Perplexity also wrote in the blogpost that it would be providing a "Perplexity RAG-LLM API with grounding for facts and citations" in the near future.
No
Yes

Updated Oct 18, 2023
On Oct 18 LangChain announced support for YouRetriever, using a search API from You.com. LangChain shared a guest blog post from You.com ("You.com x LangChain") and an interactive notebook. Some documentation is also available on You.com's website (with an example query: [reasons to smile]: Documentation > Using the Search API
(Note: "To use the You.com Search API, you will need an API key. Please reach out via email at api@you.com for more details.").

Previously:
You.com does not offer an API for search or chat at this time. However, we are considering creating one in the future. If you would like to be notified when this happens, fill out the form here.
source

Searching by API may better support evaluations of the search results and the development of modifications or extensions building on or with the search system.

We do not currently evaluate the performance of the API or restrictions on access. You.com, for instance, says this:

If you are interested in being an early access partner please email api@you.com with your use case, background, and expected daily load.
Other search engines that provide some form of API include the Brave Search API, Google (through their Programmable Search Engine's Custom Search JSON API), Microsoft's Bing Web Search API, and the Yandex Search API.

You can also get programmatic or tool-based access to web search results from many third party providers that scrape search results from search engines. For example, academic researchers have conducted research using data from SerpAPI (Zade et al., 2022 ) and Ahrefs (Williams & Carley, 2023).

Is there an API for search?

No

Metaphor

Is there an API for search?

Yes

Metaphor announced beta access to their search API on Apr 21, 2023. It is now generally available at platform.metaphor.systems

Perplexity AI

Is there an API for search?

No

Perplexity provides an API for interacting with open-source LLMs (see Oct 4, 2023 blogpost: "Introducing pplx-api". While not a search API, Perplexity also wrote in the blogpost that it would be providing a "Perplexity RAG-LLM API with grounding for facts and citations" in the near future.

Phind

Is there an API for search?

No

You.com

Is there an API for search?

Yes

Updated Oct 18, 2023
On Oct 18 LangChain announced support for YouRetriever, using a search API from You.com. LangChain shared a guest blog post from You.com ("You.com x LangChain") and an interactive notebook. Some documentation is also available on You.com's website (with an example query: [reasons to smile]: Documentation > Using the Search API
(Note: "To use the You.com Search API, you will need an API key. Please reach out via email at api@you.com for more details.").
Previously:
You.com does not offer an API for search or chat at this time. However, we are considering creating one in the future. If you would like to be notified when this happens, fill out the form here.
source