Search is the gateway to the world's information. If you can make it perfect, then that has so many downstream positive implications for the world. You can kind of think of Google as being synonymous with search, right? It's one of the greatest technoplies of the last few decades. If you want to go really deep into some topic, Google fails. Most people want to understand the world. But they're getting fed information that's just like, you know, misleading in some way or straight up wrong. And if everyone had like information that was accurate, most reasonable people would be reasonable. We have a family open club, Michael Claudeberg, and we wanted to give it web access. And he was like, I recommend exa. The world of agents searching is just completely different from human searching. An agent doesn't just want 10 pieces of information. It wants everything. The X search something and then get not just like 10 results or 100 results, but a thousand results or 10,000. How have we a team that has always been below 100 people, been able to build a search engine that's better than Google in all sorts of ways? Well, it's because for most of the internet era, search was built for humans. But AI agents search differently.

They need deeper context, more complete information, and the ability to navigate far more complex

questions than a traditional search box was designed to answer. That shift is creating an

entirely new set of challenges around retrieval, knowledge discovery, and how information

is organized online. Sarah Wang speaks with EXA co-founder and CEO Will Brick about search,

AI agents, and the future of information retrieval.

Welcome, Will. Thank you for being here. Well, excited to be here.

So I want to start with the origin story.

You've been interested in search for a long time.

In fact, you and your co-founder Jeff actually started building a mini search engine in college,

which is not what I was doing in college.

Can you say more about when you started getting interested in search and

why you wanted to solve this problem? Yeah, yeah, sure. So I would say it's a life mission. So since I was a kid, I've cared about finding the highest quality knowledge, right? I was obsessed. And then in high school, I wanted to start a new type of news organization because I thought we're a civilization that got to the moon. We split the atom and yet we can't understand what's going on at the border or in science news.

Like, why can't we fully understand any topic?

And then in college, I was roommates with Jeff, and we were like, we could just build a better search using crowdsourcing the highest quality links. And we did build a pretty solid search. But then five years ago, so in 2021, that's when Transformers started to get really good. And it suddenly became possible to build a better searcher than Google. And that was a really important opportunity because search is the gateway to the world's information. If you could, if you'd improve search, if you can make it perfect, then that has so many downstream positive implications for the world across every industry, across every part of human life. And so it just felt like this huge opportunity and no one was pursuing. And I was like, I'm going to devote my life to this because it's everything I care about is about information. And so, yeah, start at Exa and now it's gone. We actually made a lot of progress. And we're a lot closer to that mission. There's still a huge amount of things, a huge amount to go. But yeah, it's been crazy to see

how far we've come to achieving that mission that I've been thinking about for years.

Maybe just to probe a little bit deeper, you can kind of think of Google as being synonymous with

search, right? It's one of the greatest technoplies of the last few decades. And the idea that

a startup could be better than Google at search is quite amazing.

But how do you define perfect search?

And what do you see as the limitations of Google?

And I'll throw in more recent events because obviously, you know, I.O. just took place last week.

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