Web Search API

binarymax

Why not use those providers directly? Does Cloudflare need to be in the middle of everything?

tom1337

I wonder if the three search engines get access to cloudflare protected sites without any captcha or bot interventions

timpera

Interesting to see that they didn't include the Brave Search API, which is really great and imo a better experience than Exa. The absence of the Perplexity Search API is to be expected though, knowing how much these two companies despise each other.

Oras

Weird choice by CloudFlare, would been great if they have shared why it was created. I use CloudFlare developer platform and quite happy with tools, but I didn’t use the gateway API and always used OpenRouter which does support web search. I can see it useful for those who didn’t do any integrations or like to keep logs at one place, but did customers actually ask for this?

Herz

How does Cloudflare manage to hit the HN front page almost daily? Don't get me wrong, they build cool stuff, but the frequency is wild.

iphonecorridor

For those developers out there, the best is still Gemini Flash Lite 2.5 believe it or not. It gives you 1000 google searches per day for free. Compare to Flash Lite 3.x which is 5k PER MONTH and then a few pennies PER SEARCH. Nuts. Didn’t realize search was so expensive. Perhaps realizing all of this, Google hasn’t yet deprecated 2.5, bit limits access to it to “those who have used it before.” It’s really really good for low cost search!

anon373839

> All three support Zero Data Retention for requests made through Cloudflare But does CloudFlare itself commit to zero data retention? If not, this isn’t too meaningful.

freakynit

Tried one query on ceramic.ai (the default provider for cloudflare web search api): "qwen-3.8 flash next and rtx 5090 best inference setup" ... 0 results ... same query on google and ddg both yield proper results. Then shortened the query to just "qwen-3.8 flash next" ... results came.. all unrelated. In fact, these were almost all paper links .... no relation to actual search term. And I had thought that I finally had found a cheaper search alternative.

vscarpenter

I guess I'm not understanding the value here - to compete with Google and the likes, the scale, cost and complexity would be huge. Appreciate new entrants in an existing field but not seeing this one.

qznc

My coding agent uses the hister cli, i.e. a local index. That often requires me to seed it manually as a downside. The upside is that it caches website contents via browser plugin, which is a nice workaround for bot blocking. Thanks asciimoo for https://github.com/asciimoo/hister

okokwhatever

Who thought 5 years ago that searching online would have a cost...

sreekanth850

Create bot detection and bot protection, then sell crawlers. Is this the peak of hypocrisy?

ronfriedhaber

Interesting to see how this can be compared with Exa, Alas, Cloudflare really is shipping many great orthogonal products recently.

fnordsensei

I've been quite satisfied with Kagi[1]'s API. 1: https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi

corentin88

Funny how search was a graveyard for startups for almost two decades. And since ChatGPT releases (or so) it’s a trending place again.

8bite

The pricing is so different between these: ceramic.ai - $0.25 per 1,000 requests Exa - $7.00 per 1,000 requests Linkup - $5.00 per 1,000 requests Does anyone have insights on the quality differences? Web search API pricing for AI agent usecases has always felt so expensive for what it is, but I have no grounding on the economics of running a web index. EDIT: formatting

OutOfHere

This has got to be a serious antitrust violation. First Cloudflare bans all the other bots, then it allows its liaised bots.

jasonjmcghee

> All three support Zero Data Retention for requests made through Cloudflare And then on the providers page: Property Value provider exa Zero Data Retention No

karmakaze

I was just looking into these as DeepSeek Harness w/ Qwen3.8-27B relies heavily on search. I was going to go with Serper.dev[0] $1 per 1000 (or lower in quantity). The providers[1] behind this Web Search API have very different rates: Ceramic.ai: $0.25 per 1,000 requests Linkup: $5.00 per 1,000 requests Exa: $7.00 per 1,000 requests [0] https://serper.dev/ [1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/web-search/providers/

0fflineuser

I am pretty sure exa specifically say it trains on your data in it's privacy policy, so how can it be ZDR ? I remember as I was looking at the available web tools for hermes agent not to long ago and looked through the keyless web providers privacy policies, which exa is one of them.