[HN Gopher] Introducing Web Search on the Anthropic API
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Introducing Web Search on the Anthropic API
Author : cmogni1
Score : 112 points
Date : 2025-05-07 20:18 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.anthropic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.anthropic.com)
| benjamoon wrote:
| Good that it has an "allowed domain" list, makes it really
| useable. The OpenAI Responses api web search doesn't let you
| limit domains currently so can't make good use of it for client
| stuff.
| minimaxir wrote:
| The web search functionality is also available in the backend
| Workbench (click the wrench Tools icon)
| https://console.anthropic.com/workbench/
|
| The API request notably includes the exact text it cites from its
| sources (https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-
| claude/tool-us...), which is nifty.
|
| Cost-wise it's interesting. $10/1000 queries is much cheaper for
| heavy use than Google's Gemini (1500 free per day then $35/1000)
| when you'd expect Google to be the cheaper option.
| https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/grounding
| handfuloflight wrote:
| So the price is just the $0.01 per query? Are they not charging
| for the tokens loaded into context from the various sources?
| minimaxir wrote:
| The query cost is in addition to tokens used. It is unclear
| if the tokens ingested from the search query count as
| addititional input tokens.
|
| > Web search is available on the Anthropic API for $10 per
| 1,000 searches, plus standard token costs for search-
| generated content.
|
| > Each web search counts as one use, regardless of the number
| of results returned. If an error occurs during web search,
| the web search will not be billed.
| istjohn wrote:
| Well also Google has put onerous conditions on their service:
|
| - If you show users text generated by Gemini using Google
| Search (grounded Gemini), you must display a provided widget
| with suggested search terms that links directly to Google
| Search results on google.com.
|
| - You may not modify the text generated by grounded Gemini
| before displaying it to your users.
|
| - You may not store grounded responses more than 30 days,
| except for user histories, which can retain responses for up to
| 6 months.
|
| https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms#grounding-with-google...
|
| https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/grounding/search-sugge...
| miohtama wrote:
| Google obviously does not want to cannibalise their golden
| goose. However it's inevitable that Google search will start
| to suffer because people need it less and less with LLMs.
| aaronscott wrote:
| It would be nice if the search provider could be configured. I
| would like to use this with Kagi.
| lemming wrote:
| I would really love this too. However I think that the only
| solution for that is to give it a Kagi search tool, in
| combination with a web scraping tool, and a loop while it
| figures out whether it's got the information it needs to answer
| the question.
| cmogni1 wrote:
| I think the most interesting thing to me is they have multi-hop
| search & query refinement built in based on prior
| context/searches. I'm curious how well this works.
|
| I've built a lot of LLM applications with web browsing in it.
| Allow/block lists are easy to implement with most web search
| APIs, but multi-hop gets really hairy (and expensive) to do well
| because it usually requires context from the URLs themselves.
|
| The thing I'm still not seeing here that makes LLM web browsing
| particularly difficult is the mismatch between search result
| relevance vs LLM relevance. Getting a diverse list of links is
| great when searching Google because there is less context per
| query, but what I really need from an out-of-the-box LLM web
| browsing API is reranking based on the richer context provided by
| a message thread/prompt.
|
| For example, writing an article about the side effects of
| Accutane should err on the side of pulling in research articles
| first for higher quality information and not blog posts.
|
| It's possible to do this reranking decently well with LLMs (I do
| it in my "agents" that I've written), but I haven't seen this
| highlighted from anyone thus far, including in this announcement.
| simple10 wrote:
| That's been my experience as well. Web search built into the
| API is great for convenience, but it would be ideal to be able
| to provide detailed search and reranking params.
|
| Would be interesting to see comparisons for custom web search
| RAG vs API. I'm assuming that many of the search "params" of
| the API could be controlled via prompting?
| simonw wrote:
| I couldn't see anything in the documentation about whether or not
| it's allowed to permanently store the results coming back from
| search.
|
| Presumably this is using Brave under the hood, same as Claude's
| search feature via the Anthropic apps?
| minimaxir wrote:
| Given the context/use of encrypted_index and encrypted_context,
| I suspect search results are temporarily cached.
| simonw wrote:
| Right, but are there any restrictions on what I can do with
| them?
|
| Google Gemini has some: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-
| api/docs/grounding/search-sugge...
|
| OpenAI has some rules too:
| https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/tools-web-
| search#out...
|
| > "When displaying web results or information contained in
| web results to end users, inline citations must be made
| clearly visible and clickable in your user interface."
|
| I'm used to search APIs coming with BIG sets of rules on how
| you can use the results. I'd be surprised but happy if
| Anthropic didn't have any.
|
| The Brave Search API is a great example of this:
| https://brave.com/search/api/
|
| They have a special, much more expensive tier called "Data w/
| storage rights" which is $45 CPM, compared to $5 CPM for the
| tier that doesn't include those storage rights.
| istjohn wrote:
| Google's restrictions are outlandish: "[You] will not
| modify, or intersperse any other content with, the Grounded
| Results or Search Suggestions..."
| lemming wrote:
| I'm also interested to know if there are other limitations with
| this. Gemini, for example, has a built-in web search tool, but it
| can't be used in combination with other tools, which is a little
| annoying. o3/o4-mini can't use the search tool at all over the
| API, which is even more annoying.
| omneity wrote:
| Related: For those who want to build their own AI search for free
| and connect it to any model they want, I created a browser MCP
| that interfaces with major public search engines [0], a SERP MCP
| if you want, with support for multiple pages of results.
|
| The rate limits of the upstream engines are fine for personal
| use, and the benefit is it uses the same browser you do, so
| results are customized to your search habits out-of-the-box (or
| you could use a blank browser profile).
|
| 0: https://herd.garden/trails/@omneity/serp
| potlee wrote:
| If you use your own search tool, you would have to pay for input
| tokens again every time the model decides to search. This would
| be a big discount if they only charging once for all output as
| output tokens but seems unclear from the blog post
| jarbus wrote:
| Is search really that costly to run? $10/1000 searches seems
| really pricey. I'm wondering if these costs will come down in a
| few years.
| tuyguntn wrote:
| they will come down, because up until recently consumers were
| not paying directly for searches, with the LLM which has a
| cutoff date in the past and hallucinations, search got popular
| paid API.
|
| Popularity will grow even more, hence competition will increase
| and prices will change eventually
| AznHisoka wrote:
| I dont think that will be true. What competition? Google,
| Bing, and.. Kagi? (And only one of those have a far superior
| index/algo than the others)
| jsnell wrote:
| Yes.
|
| The Bing Search API is priced at $15/1k queries in the cheapest
| tier, Brave API is $9 at the non-toy tier, Google's pricing for
| a general search API is unknown but their Search grounding in
| Gemini costs $35/1k queries.
|
| Search API prices have been going up, not down, over time. The
| opposite of LLMs, which have gotten 1000x cheaper over the last
| two years.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| If you want an unofficial API, most data providers usually
| charge $4/1000 queries or so. By unofficial, I mean they just
| scrape whats in Google and return that to you. So thats the
| benchmark I use, which means the cost here is around 2x that.
|
| As far as I know, the pricing really hasnt gone down over the
| years. If anything it has gone up because Google is
| increasingly making it harder for these providers
| zhyder wrote:
| Now all the big 3 LLM providers provide web search grounding in
| their APIs, but how do they compare in ranking quality of the
| retrieved web search results? Anyone run benchmarks here?
|
| Clearly web search ranking is hard after decades of content spam
| that's been SEO optimized (and we get to look forward to
| increasing AI spam dominating the web in the future). The best
| LLM provider in the future could be the one with just the best
| web search ranking, just like what allowed Google to initially
| win in search.
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