Composing a Search Engine

What this post added

This post introduces Canon, a new search pipeline orchestrator built at Exa. It details the motivation for its creation, stemming from the complexity of modern search engines and the challenges of serving AI agents. The core technical contribution is the representation of search pipelines as DAGs, with explanations of the benefits this provides (automatic parallelism, durable execution, introspectability, decoupled definition/execution). It also describes the pull-based runtime architecture, its role in maximizing compute efficiency and providing observability, and the importance of nodes interacting with the runtime through a uniform interface.