How To Add Realtime Search To Your AI SaaS

You asked ChatGPT for something, and it reminds you about the cut-off date for their data. Data itself is valuable today, but having the latest, relevant data is worth more.

When building a SaaS, especially one that’s using AI in some capacity, you might want to search the internet after the user has entered a query in your application. With the right API, this is certainly possible, and there are a few options out there.

The obvious first choice would be to see if there’s a way to search Google in real-time. And there is. If you’re using the Google Cloud Platform, it makes even more sense to use an API that is already on the platform.

If you’re not on GCP or you’re looking for something that will give your application an edge, the Brave Search API is a great option.

They have special pricing for AI apps, including a plan for those who wish to cache or store their data to train AI models. You also get alternate snippets for AI models that provide more data than your typical search results.

A typical search result snippet consists of the few lines you see at the bottom of a website in the search results. This is meant for people to decide whether or not to click on a link.

The free plan offers 2,000 queries per month, which is similar to Google’s 100 queries per day plan.

You get web, image, news, and video search on the free plan.

The Pro plan comes with these additions:

• Schema-enriched web results

• Frequently asked questions

• Locations

• Discussions to easily access posts from sites like Reddit

• AI summarizer with citations

To get started, just sign up for a free API account, create an API key, and refer to their documentation to integrate it into your application.