A TOPIC, IN CONTEXT

AI search

Web retrieval, indexing, search agents, and query-to-page matching.

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Parag Agrawal

Build for a customer that has not arrived yet

Parag Agrawal describes building technology for a future internet customer whose requirements the team is still learning.

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Original excerpt

in a few years a new customer is going to show up on the internet, and let’s go build technology for the not-yet-here customer that we are all learning every day and every week
Parallel’s Parag Agrawal: Building a New Web for AI Agents
Context

Listen, when I was at Twitter in leadership roles, Twitter was a post-product-market fit, extraordinarily scaled business where your feedback loops were from the hundreds of millions of customers using the product for 30+ minutes every day, right? In that world, you operate differently than a pre-product-market-fit company based on the premise that .

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Web search involves matching many pages with many queries

Parag Agrawal describes web search as a matching problem involving hundreds of billions of pages and queries over time.

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Original excerpt

So you have hundreds of billions of pages and hundreds of billions of queries over time, and you need to figure out how to matchmake across these two.
Parallel’s Parag Agrawal: Building a New Web for AI Agents
Context

One way to think about it is it’s a billion-to-billion matching problem, right?

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A search agent can crawl after a query arrives

Parag Agrawal says Parallel launched a search-agent product before a search product. It could crawl the web after receiving a query, with deep-research users willing to wait.

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Original excerpt

So if you’re doing deep research, you have patience to the extent of a minute.
Parallel’s Parag Agrawal: Building a New Web for AI Agents
Context

When we first launched the product, we did not launch a search product first. We launched a search agent product first. Our search agent could go essentially crawl the web after a query arrived. And we’ve had products which sometimes take 10 minutes of research. That’s a lot of time to be able to crawl a lot of pages, if only you have enough of a map to know what to prioritize crawling, right? So you can make up for shortcomings. Like, index is oftentimes—you can think of it as a latency optimization. So if you give up on that dimension, if you’re competing with humans—that’s why our search agents were competing with the alternative, being outsourcing to humans to curate amazing data, right? So we said it seems like humans sitting on search engines are way easier to compete with than a search engine on day zero. So by building a product that was a search agent to do real work on top of web data, we were able to incrementally go build our index.

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