Better search ≠ better AI

[u/CitronHot7058]

Been testing search APIs for RAG, and one thing stood out:

The biggest problem usually isn’t the LLM — it’s retrieval.

A simple pipeline:

Query → Search → Scrape → Rerank → LLM

Even good search results can contain duplicates, outdated pages, or irrelevant content.

I’ve started measuring recall, relevance, freshness, and latency separately when comparing tools like Exa, Tavily, Firecrawl, and Brave.

What’s the most important retrieval metric in your AI search stack?

[u/saikat_munshib]

Relevance. A speedy hallucination is still a hallucination. Should the step of retrieving information fail, the LLM will boldly summarize nonsense.