alt Hacker NewsAny organization that wants reliable latency, data processing guarantees (it's a big leak vector for company secrets), etc., will use such a search provider over the solutions you outlined.
Especially for chat-like use-cases (in contrast to coding), latency is a lot more critical, especially if you kick off a small single query question. On antother axis, scrape-reliabilty is important for a deep research job that will fire ~10+ web searches and ~100+ web fetches.
e.g. in our chat platform[0], we offer first party MCP servers for web search[1] and web access[2] which work decently well, but some of our customers that prioritize quality over cost, they go with dedicated providers like LinkUp[3]
[0]: https://github.com/EratoLab/erato
[1]: https://github.com/EratoLab/web-search-mcp
Replies
lmao at DeepSeek and "data processing guarantees"
We all know these providers have routed their users to OpenAI/Anthropic without telling them.
These are companies that use hundreds of thousands of stolen credit cards to sign up for fake accounts.
No sane business will use DeepSeek's API directly.
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GTG-16001: DeepSeek serves Claude instead of its own models and collects exchanges for model training
DeepSeek also silently relayed exchanges to Claude without informing DeepSeek customers. Like GTG-16002, their customers were likely not made aware that their requests were being funneled to Claude.
These cases include:
• A PRC technology company. An employee of a PRC-based technology company used what they believed was DeepSeek to analyze internal documentation. DeepSeek relayed that data to Claude. This data included sensitive information, including, for example, the full specifications, organizational structure, and strategic objectives of a flagship AI program. The company was almost certainly not made aware that its data was being relayed to Claude.
• Russian defense agency. DeepSeek relayed requests from an IT operator working with data from a Russian government agency associated with its Ministry of Defense. The relayed requests exposed live credentials for a Russian government database.
• PRC police surveillance. Engineers building a case management system for a municipal Public Security Bureau in China used DeepSeek, which relayed those requests to Claude. The engineer built a tool that compares a person’s movements against police records using the national ID number of citizens.
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edit: yikes the PRC bots didn't like this comment
Can you explain how this would help protect a company's secrets? I would think that if you want to keep your IP secret surely using something like Deepseek's API directly is not ideal and hosting something locally is best practice.