1. adding another hop in front of the search provider adds latency, which as an inference company I imagine you know sucks
2. I'm not convinced you actually want to route between this many search providers, for inference you generally just want the best web search available, which obviously I'd argue is Exa :) I can understand something like Apify + Exa where you need specialized/unique data, but otherwise the routing feels like extra complexity without much upside?
1. yeah, we've optimized significantly for latency, give the API a try and you'll see it's pretty fast.
2. more than you think, we use a wide range of providers internally depending on the context needed. Exa could be great in some for example people search but is pretty bad at getting the latest content of the page, Parallel is better there. Apify is great for getting google ranked pages. Perplexity is great at financial data which Exa is pretty bad at. Context7 (coming soon) great at code, way better than exa for code. Depending on the use case, different indexes do better. we're also seeing companies with access to prosperity data like Valyu.