Exa Introduces Snapshot, A New Way to Search the Past

Exa, an API Developer for LLM Search, led by Will Bryk and Jeff Wang, has introduced Snapshot, a new way to search the past.

As AI models are tested on increasingly complex tasks, temporal evaluation is emerging as a way to measure whether models could have discovered information before it was published or predicted what happened next.

Exa Snapshot enables this testing by providing access to more than 400 billion webpage snapshots spanning two decades, allowing searches of the web as it existed at a specific point in time.

Reasons to Test with Hindsight.

Prevent web leakage and enable reproducible evaluations:

AI agents trained on past tasks can accidentally access solutions published later, making it difficult to distinguish genuine reasoning from web copying. Snapshot lets researchers search the web as it existed before those solutions were published, creating a cleaner evaluation environment.

Finance and quantitative trading:

Web-based trading signals face a similar challenge: backtesting requires access to information available at a specific point in time. Snapshot provides a versioned view of the web, enabling historical backtesting without months of manual data collection.

How to Use It.

Snapshot can be accessed through the /search and /contents API endpoints by setting snapshotAsOf. The capability is currently available as a research preview and remains under development.

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