The native web search api is 10x cheaper than OpenAIs. I hope they will release the web search api as a standalone API.
I gave it a kick and got mixed results. For example, searching for a Microsoft product couldn't find its landing page, and searching for a niche open source package landed in the Debian repos for the top hits, but the home page was in the first 10 hits.
Lovely to see they're doing their own search though, I love how many folk are actively working on search clones at the moment.
I may be missing something so apologies if I'm telling you something you already know but: there are plenty of web search APIs for agents - the Brave one is the one I use: https://brave.com/search/api/