Scira Now Uses the You.com Web Search API as Its Default Search Provider

TLDR: Scira, the AI research assistant behind more than 5 million answered searches, now uses You.com as its default web search provider. Every web-mode run on scira.ai pulls results from the You.com Web Search API, which returns several extracted passages per page instead of a single snippet, along with a separate news section, date-range filtering, and image thumbnails in the same response.

For Scira users, that means cited answers grounded in more of each source's actual text, and fresher results for time-sensitive questions and scheduled Lookouts. For developers, the same Search API is available to build on directly. This post covers what changed, how the search layer affects answer quality, and how to call the API yourself, including where its limits are.

An AI search engine is only as honest as the text its search layer hands back. If the provider returns a title and a 160-character meta description, the model fills in the rest on its own, and the citation next to that sentence points at a page the model never read. Scira built its reputation on showing its work. Every claim gets an inline source you can click and audit, and that promise depends on the search results carrying real page content.

Scira now uses the You.com Web Search API as its default web search provider. Below is what that changes for people asking questions on scira.ai, and what developers can take from it for their own agents.

Why the Search Provider Matters to Scira

Scira describes itself as research that shows its work. More than 100,000 people use it, and it has answered over 5 million searches. A single run splits a question into sub-questions, searches sources in parallel, dedupes results by canonical URL, and writes an answer with an inline citation on every claim. When two sources disagree, Scira shows both instead of quietly picking the one that reads better. It ships 18 built-in modes, from Academic to Reddit to X, and connects to more than 100 apps over MCP, so a run can end with a page created in Notion or an issue filed in Linear after the user approves it.

Most of that work starts with a web query. The sub-questions, the cross-checking, and the citations all inherit whatever the search provider returns, so the provider sets the ceiling on how good an answer can be.

What the You.com Web Search API Brings to Scira

Answers Grounded in Page Passages

You.com runs its own index instead of reselling another engine's results, and each result comes back with several extracted passages from the page. Scira's model reads that text before it writes the sentence that cites the page. Cross-checking gets easier too: when Scira compares two sources on a disputed claim, it is comparing paragraphs rather than headlines.

Fresher News and Date-Bounded Research

The Search API returns news and web results as separate sections, so a time-sensitive question can lead with today's coverage while keeping the background web results behind it. It also accepts a freshness date range, which keeps results inside a window you set. Lookouts, Scira's scheduled research agents that email you what changed on a topic since the last run, depend on exactly this kind of filtering. A Lookout that resurfaces last month's story as news has failed at its one job.

Images in the Same Response

Each result can carry a thumbnail, so Scira gets images for an answer from the same call that returned the text. There is no second scraping request to fetch a picture and no second vendor bill attached to it.

Building Your Own Agent on the Same Web Search API

Nothing about this setup is specific to Scira. If you are building a research agent, a support bot, or anything else that cites the web, you can call the same Search API that now sits behind Scira's web mode. A request looks like this:

curl -G "https://ydc-index.io/v1/search" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $YDC_API_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "query=cerebras chip announcement" \
  --data-urlencode "count=10" \
  --data-urlencode "freshness=2026-09-20to2026-10-20"

The parameters that matter most for an agent like Scira:

The response separates web and news results, and each web result includes multiple text passages and, where available, a thumbnail. That shape suits an agent that has to plan, read, and cite in one pass, since the content arrives with the result.

Know the limits before you put this in front of real users. Livecrawl costs more because it fetches pages at request time, so reserve it for queries where freshness is worth paying for.

Requests are rate-limited by plan, and an agent that fans one question out into six sub-questions will burn through a low limit quickly. Budget for the fan-out, not for the number of questions your users type.

Search Quality Is Citation Quality

Scira's inline citations are only as trustworthy as the text behind them. With page passages, separate news results, and images arriving in a single response, the model reads more of each source before it writes, and Lookouts stay inside the date window they were asked to watch. Developers building their own agents get the same search layer through one API call.

Try it: Ask Scira something hard at scira.ai. Building your own AI search or agent? Get a You.com API key and start with the Search API for free.