Metaphor Systems

Metaphor, now rebranded as Exa, is an innovative AI-powered search engine that approaches information retrieval fundamentally differently from keyword-based search. Rather than finding documents that contain specific words, Exa finds documents that are semantically similar to a description, example, or concept — enabling discovery of content that traditional search cannot find.

The platform's neural search technology creates semantic embeddings of both the query and web content, finding matches based on conceptual meaning rather than word overlap. This approach excels at finding content that discusses a concept from different angles, is written in different terminology, or represents similar ideas in different domains.

Exa's search API is its most widely used product, enabling developers to build applications that leverage semantic search capabilities. Use cases include finding similar companies to a given example, discovering relevant research in adjacent fields, finding comparable products or services, and identifying thematically related content for recommendation systems.

The platform's ability to search by example is particularly powerful — users can provide a piece of content they like and find semantically similar content, rather than trying to describe what they're looking for in keywords. This is especially useful for content discovery, market research, and finding analogous examples in different domains.

Exa's content extraction feature retrieves the full text of discovered pages rather than just URLs, enabling applications to work with actual content rather than just finding relevant links. This full-content retrieval is valuable for building research automation and content analysis pipelines.