Seltz
The fastest, high quality, search API for AI agents
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Hi HN, Antonio here. Founder of Seltz.Seltz is a web search API built for AI agents. We wrote the crawler, the index, and the retrieval models ourselves, in Rust, by a team that's spent years building web search at scale. In our tests, queries come back in under 200ms.Efficiency was the first design principle. Search sits on the critical path: agents can't generate their first tokens or kick off the next tool call until results come back. When you run tens or hundreds of queries in parallel, every millisecond of tail latency compounds.Most search APIs for agents are wrappers around Google or Bing. If your agent already has a Google tool, a second call to a Google-wrapped API returns the same ten documents. We run our own independent index, so you get different results and different rankings.Coverage starts with US news. More verticals are coming.There's a free tier with $100 in credits at the link. I'd love feedback from anyone building agents: how does it compare to what you're using, and where does it fall over?
HN · launched Apr 20, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 89%) · 0 views
Niche: search engine infrastructure and optimization tools · 58 launches, 4 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Search & retrieval
- Developer
- AI-native
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 58 launches in search engine infrastructure and optimization tools →
Could you build this?
No Building a web-scale search engine with custom crawlers, inverted index, sub-200ms retrieval, and web data pipelines requires huge infrastructure capital and advanced search systems engineering.
What it would actually take: Building Seltz requires a massive distributed crawler infrastructure capable of handling politeness, JavaScript rendering, and petabyte-scale storage, coupled with an inverted index and vector search engine written in Rust or C++. The hardest parts are maintaining fresh web-scale crawl indexes, deduplication, spam filtering, and low-latency distributed query retrieval under 200ms. It requires millions in bandwidth/compute and a veteran search/information retrieval engineering team.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: 10 other search APIs (unnamed), PISA Engine
Concerns raised: Latency in agent loops limits follow-up queries, Search accuracy benchmarking needs rigorous methodology
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 347 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #327 of 348 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 167 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Crustdata (YC F24) · hn · 2026-02-25 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.47
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- Crustdata - Web Search API for AI Agents · yc · 2026-02-05 · 79 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Moltis · hn · 2026-02-12 · 131 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Semble · hn · 2026-04-26 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.44
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