Telem
Route agent web search across providers and inspect the traces
Details
- External ID
- 49469804
- Source
- HN
- Company
- ā
- Product
- Telem
- Website domain
- telem.ai
- Launched
- Aug. 27, 2026
- Cohort
- ā
- Upvotes
- 8
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.4731182795698925
- Tags
- ā
- 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 Iād 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.
- 83 browser-use trajectories, visualized · hn · 2026-01-23 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Seltz · hn · 2026-04-20 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- AgentPort · hn · 2026-04-29 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Agent-browser-shield · hn · 2026-06-03 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Airbyte Agents · hn · 2026-05-05 · 156 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- The new Firecrawl /search · ph · 2026-07-24 · 259 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Web Search Agents by Nimble · ph · 2026-09-14 · 306 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Routing24 · hn · 2026-07-04 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.43
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a observability & eval tool for Media & entertainment yet.