Factory Cuts Droid Web Search Latency by 5x and Pushes Reliability Past 99.9% with You.com

How Factory updated their Droid agent with the You.com Web Search API to ground it in faster, more reliable, and more cost-efficient context.

Factory helps enterprises build their software factory, an end-to-end system where agents turn signals into shipped software. Factory's Droid coding agents implement features, validate code, monitor production, and triage incidents across the TUI, web/Desktop app, Slack, and Linear. Current web search is critical infrastructure for Factory, grounding every workflow in up-to-date documentation instead of stale training data.

After hitting reliability and latency ceilings with their previous provider, Factory benchmarked You.com against a competing offering and migrated to the You.com Search API. Reliability jumped to above three 9s. P50 latency dropped from over five seconds to sub-one second. Sessions are cheaper because Droid converges on the right answer faster when it starts with the right context.

The Customer

Factory helps enterprises ship software through a continuous feedback loop. Its coding agents span the full software development lifecycle, implementing features, validating code, monitoring production, and triaging incidents. Engineers sit at the center as the governance layer, setting direction, enforcing standards, and owning the outcomes the software factory produces.

Because of this, the Droid underlying model and tooling stack have to be both fast and dependable. Web search in particular plays a quiet but critical role: it grounds Droid in current, accurate documentation whenever the model's training data falls short.

The Challenge

Factory's previous web search provider was creating two persistent problems for the Droid harness. Reliability occasionally dropped below three 9s, meaning a nontrivial slice of agent sessions experienced failed search calls. P50 latency was above five seconds, adding noticeable drag to every grounded action. For an agent that may call web search several times in a single session, those two issues compound— slowing convergence to a correct answer and forcing Droid into more iteration loops on integrations and unfamiliar APIs.

The decision to move to a better Search API came down to operational performance: Factory needed a search API that could meet agent-grade reliability and latency SLAs at scale.

The Solution

Factory benchmarked You.com for reliability, latency, and quality and, based on its superior performance, chose to migrate Droid's web search tool to the You.com Search API. Inside Droid, the API is used wherever the agent needs to ground its work in fresh information — most often:

• Pulling up-to-date SDK and API documentation when implementing or extending an integration.
• Fetching code snippets and architectural overviews when navigating an unfamiliar system or library.
• Looking up configuration steps for MCP servers and other developer tooling that Droid is asked to enable.

The Results

After the migration, Factory measured marked improvements on the two metrics that drove the switch:

• Reliability: Web search success rate moved from below three 9s with the previous provider to three 9s or higher with You.com, with some windows reaching four 9s.
• Latency: P50 web search latency dropped from over five seconds to sub-one second—a 5x+ improvement on the median call.
• Session efficiency: With You.com, sessions are cheaper. With better upfront grounding, Droid avoids redundant iteration loops and converges on correct answers sooner. Factory is seeing lower costs for sessions, and Droid is reaching a correct answer much sooner because it has access to the right context.

Build Agents Grounded in a Better Context

As the leader in agentic software development, Factory is obsessively focused on the speed and reliability of every part of the software development lifecycle. You.com's Web Search API will remain a key driver as Factory helps enterprises build their own software factories.

If your agents depend on the open web for grounding, retrieval, or research, the You.com Web Search API delivers the reliability and latency profile that agent-grade workloads demand — backed by the same search infrastructure that powers customer deployments at Factory and across leading AI teams.