Guides
Written from engineering practice rather than from a content calendar. Where a guide names a number, it is sourced; where it recommends something, it says when not to.
Verified 5 August 2026
Agent retrieval
Web search for AI agents
Agent retrieval inverts the assumptions of consumer search: precision matters more than recall, metadata beats full text, and absence has to be explainable.
5 sections · 3 questions answered
Build a research agent
A research agent that searches, reads, and searches again spends most of its budget rebuilding structure the index already has. Graph traversal collapses that loop.
6 sections · 3 questions answered
Multilingual search for agents
One embedding space for 101 languages means a query in one language retrieves relevant passages in another — no translation, no per-language index.
5 sections · 3 questions answered
Trust & accuracy
Stop agents hallucinating from search results
Retrieval reduces hallucination but does not eliminate it. Two structural fixes — corroboration counting and explainable absence — address the failure modes prompting cannot.
4 sections · 3 questions answered
Auditable retrieval for regulated work
In regulated work the question after an answer is "what did it miss". Four capabilities make that answerable: time-bounded queries, corroboration thresholds, explainable exclusion and per-passage reasons.
5 sections · 3 questions answered
Cost
Reduce the token cost of web-searching agents
Most of what an agent spends on retrieval is not the search call — it is the context consumed by results it did not need and the reasoning spent rejecting them.
6 sections · 3 questions answered
Search API pricing explained
Credits, per-request fees, per-token charges and processor tiers make headline rates non-comparable. Here is how to normalise them.
5 sections · 3 questions answered
Put it into practice
10,000 free requests a month, no card. Everything in these guides works on the free tier.