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Telem

Route agent web search across providers and inspect the traces

Details

External ID
49469804
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Telem
Website domain
telem.ai
Launched
Aug. 27, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
8
Upvotes percentile
0.4731182795698925
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 10, 2026, 5:31 a.m.
Updated at
Sept. 10, 2026, 5:31 a.m.

Description

TL;DR: Web search open router that routes agent web search across providers (Exa, Parallel, Tavily, Brave, SerpAPI etc.), and traces web search results with quality metrics, so you can visualize whether a bad agent run is a web search problem or a reasoning problem.I work in venture capital, and before that I worked in information retrieval. When agents went viral, I built a due diligence agent for my day job. I vibe-coded the first version. It was pretty bad. My first reaction is to blame the model. I tried to change backend models, maybe because Fable doesn't want to help me do people search? Maybe because GPT 5.5 overthinks things? I tried DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen; I changed prompts again and again, no good. Then I stopped just simply checking the final answer and started reading the actual trajectories: what did the agent search for? What came back? What pages did it read? At what point agents were off the rail?Pretty interesting: Sometimes the agent is stuck and confused because the information provided is irrelevant or even wrong; Sometimes the agent keeps iterate the same query, like "XXX lab UCB CS PhD founder 2026" "2026 XXX lab machine learning systems students startup" because the web search provider is not up-to-date; Sometimes sub-agents give up too early because the agent's intelligence is not enough or too "guardrailed"; Sometimes everything is just slow. A run jeopardized at minute 1 but still ran for another 10 before returning nonsense. That's because of bad searches, but nothing reveals it.So I built two things:1. Web Search/Fetch router: One gateway for Exa, Parallel, Tavily, Brave, Ceramic, Linkup, Seltz, You, SerpAPI, etc. You or your agent can pick one or query several concurrently, and the responses come back in a homogeneous format. 2. Web Search Observability: Trace every search your agent (and its sub-agents) makes with an evaluator scoring relevance, diversity, and a few other things. Point is to answer one question: is your pipeline broken because the web search is bad? If so, where?Everything is agent-operated. All u need to do is to run this shell script: <curl -fsSL https://docs.telem.ai/alpha_install.sh | sh> Please give it a try, any feedback/suggestion would be great! Especially I’d like to ask: how are you debugging search/retrieval failures nowadays?

Enrichment

Theme
browser automation and scraping for AI
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Observability & eval
Audience
Developer
AI stance
AI feature
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
route and inspect agent web search across providers
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Yes Telem is a proxy gateway that accepts search queries, delegates them to multiple third-party search APIs (Exa, Brave, Tavily), logs execution traces, and exposes a management/metrics UI.

Discussion

2 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: ceramic, seltz, brave, exa, parallel

Concerns raised: ceramic lacks depth for complex queries, brave underperforms on domain-specific queries like financial research, exa struggles with latest news coverage

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 168 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #95 of 169 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 288 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a observability & eval tool for Media & entertainment yet.