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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

The web search functionality is also available in the backend Workbench (click the wrench Tools icon) https://console.anthropic.com/workbench/

The API request notably includes the exact text it cites from its sources (https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/tool-us...), which is nifty.

Cost-wise it's interesting. $10/1000 queries is much cheaper for heavy use than Google's Gemini (1500 free per day then $35/1000) when you'd expect Google to be the cheaper option. https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/grounding

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Well also Google has put onerous conditions on their service:

- If you show users text generated by Gemini using Google Search (grounded Gemini), you must display a provided widget with suggested search terms that links directly to Google Search results on google.com.

- You may not modify the text generated by grounded Gemini before displaying it to your users.

- You may not store grounded responses more than 30 days, except for user histories, which can retain responses for up to 6 months.

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms#grounding-with-google...

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/grounding/search-sugge...

Google obviously does not want to cannibalise their golden goose. However it's inevitable that Google search will start to suffer because people need it less and less with LLMs.

So the price is just the $0.01 per query? Are they not charging for the tokens loaded into context from the various sources?

The query cost is in addition to tokens used. It is unclear if the tokens ingested from the search query count as addititional input tokens.

> Web search is available on the Anthropic API for $10 per 1,000 searches, plus standard token costs for search-generated content.

> Each web search counts as one use, regardless of the number of results returned. If an error occurs during web search, the web search will not be billed.

Hi, stephanie from Anthropic here. Thanks for the feedback! We've updated the docs to hopefully make it a little more clear but yes search results do count towards input tokens

https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/tool-us...

Thanks for the update!

> Web search results in the conversation are counted as input tokens on subsequent completion requests during the current turn or on subsequent conversation turns.

Yes, that's clear.

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