“Yes. You.com's API is potentially good enough for a small team to build a customer-facing search product, and it is worth evaluating seriously.”
+ straightforward REST API
“- Straightforward REST API.”
+ structured results
“- Structured results.”
+ search and content extraction
“- Search and content extraction.”
+ transparent usage-based pricing
“- Transparent usage-based pricing.”
+ no requirement to use its own LLM
“- No requirement to use You.com's own LLM.”
+ inexpensive self-service pricing
“The published self-service pricing is relatively inexpensive.”
+ SOC 2 certification
“You.com advertises SOC 2 certification and offers Zero Data Retention under enterprise agreements.”
− default rate limit
“The default self-service rate limit is 10 requests per second per endpoint.”
− unverified search quality
“A technically excellent API doesn't necessarily produce excellent search results for your particular customers.”
− limited ranking control
“You can boost, include and exclude domains, but I'd investigate how much control you have over ranking and whether you can consistently influence the results.”
“- Tavily — particularly relevant for AI-oriented search and retrieval.”
“- Exa — worth testing for semantic search and finding relevant content.”
“- Brave Search API — another candidate for conventional web search infrastructure.”