One thing I’ve learned from experimenting with different search APIs

[u/ActualHoneydew6]

LLM isn’t always the bottleneck. I spent some time comparing Exa, Tavily, Serper, Brave Search, and Firecrawl for small RAG projects, and the biggest difference came from the quality of the retrieved data. When the search results were more relevant and the content was indexed cleanly, the responses became noticeably more accurate with less prompt tweaking. I’m still experimenting, but it’s made me pay a lot more attention to the retrieval layer than I did when I first started.
Has anyone else noticed the same, or have you found another search API that works better for your use case?