SOTA Search Over Academic Publications

What this post added

This post introduces a new, dedicated search system for academic publications. It details the scale of the index (350M publications, 30M authors), the semantic search approach that handles natural language queries and imperfect recall, and introduces new evaluation benchmarks (known-item and tip-of-the-tongue retrieval). It also outlines the technical components of the ingestion pipeline (OCR, document parsing) and the query-time process (combining web and publication index results). Performance metrics show Exa outperforming Google Scholar, Perplexity, and other systems in recall and MRR.