WebSeeker

An open source AI search engine. Powered by Gemini AI and Secured by Vonage API.

Tech stack

• Next.js app router with Tailwind
• Gemini AI for LLM inference
• Gemini Flask-2.5 for the LLMs
• Exa.ai for the search API
• Plausible for website analytics

How it works

1. Take in a user's question
2. Make a request to the Exa AI search built API to look up the top 6 results and show them
3. Scrape text from the 6 links bing sent back and store it as context
4. Make a request to gemini flask 2.5 with the user's question + context & stream it back to the user
5. Make another request to gemini to come up with 3 related questions the user can follow up with

Cloning & running

1. Fork or clone the repo
2. Create an account at Gemini for the LLM
3. Create an account at Vonage for two-factor authentication
4. Create an account at Exa AI for Search built
5. Create a .env (use the .example.env for reference) and replace the API keys
6. Run npm install and npm run dev to install dependencies and run locally

Future tasks

• Move back to the Google Gemini SDK + simpler streaming
• Add a tokenizer to smartly count number of tokens for each source and ensure we're not going over
• Add a regenerate option for a user to re-generate
• Make sure the answer correctly cites all the sources in the text & number the citations in the UI
• Add sharability to allow folks to share answers
• Automatically scroll when an answer is happening, especially for mobile
• Fix hard refresh in the header and footer by migrating answers to a new page
• Add upstash redis for caching results & rate limiting users
• Add in more advanced RAG techniques like keyword search & question rephrasing

Inspiration

• Perplexity
• You.com
• Lepton search

Submitted for DevNetwork [API + Cloud + Data] Hackathon 2025