Accessing the internet's vast information programmatically and at scale has been a persistent challenge for developers. Legacy search providers often keep their indices proprietary, limiting external use. Other services have attempted to bridge this gap but have not met the quality standards required for modern AI applications, where reliable and structured data retrieval is essential.

Perplexity has now introduced its Search API to tackle this issue. The API grants developers access to the same infrastructure that supports Perplexity's public answer engine, which indexes hundreds of billions of webpages. This allows for information retrieval through a single interface.

Along with the API, Perplexity is releasing:

1. An SDK to simplify integration.
2. An open-source evaluation framework for testing search APIs ( search evals).
3. A research overview from Perplexity Research on the API's design, optimization, and evaluation.

The API is tailored for AI workloads, focusing on context at a sub-document level. It breaks documents into smaller units, scores them against queries, and returns ranked snippets from the most relevant parts. This reduces the need for additional preprocessing.

Perplexity emphasizes accuracy and trust in its infrastructure. The system handles information staleness by processing tens of thousands of index updates per second, ensuring fresh results. It uses an AI-powered module for content understanding, which generates parsing logic for web data and improves itself through evaluations and user query signals.

In terms of performance:

1. The API offers relevance and speed, with Perplexity's evaluation framework showing it outperforms competitors in output quality and latency for single-step searches and agentic workflows.
2. It provides these capabilities at a lower cost.
3. The design prioritizes usability for developers and AI agents, including a new API Platform for console and documentation, covering both Search and Sonar APIs.

The Search API team will participate in Perplexity's San Francisco API Day and London hackathon next month. Developers can also connect through the online community. Users of the API will benefit from ongoing improvements in Perplexity's products.

This launch extends Perplexity's efforts to make knowledge accessible, now supporting developers in various industries and use cases.