DeepSeek Flash 1017 Ships Search and Fetch APIs, Dropping the Barrier to Agent Web Search

I've created an AI exchange group. If you want to learn Agent project implementation or discuss Agent technology, you can add my WeChat yunmz777.

Recently I was adding web search capability to my Agent. I had implemented it myself before; it worked, but the results were always a bit lacking.

Then I saw the DeepSeek Flash 1017 update, which opened up the Search and Fetch APIs. I wired them in and tried them. Wow, at least in my own use cases, the effect is genuinely amazing.

The purpose of these two interfaces is easy to understand: Search is responsible for finding material, and Fetch reads the web page body. This way the Agent can first find relevant content, then read the original text and context as needed, and finally organize its answer. Anyone who has built this themselves knows how much effort search result processing and web page text extraction take.

Pricing is also comfortable: both interfaces are 5 yuan per 1000 successful requests. If one task does one search and reads three pages, that part costs only two cents, with model call fees separate. For developers like us building our own Agents, doing several rounds of searching and checking multiple sources is affordable.

Also, some people online say its search backend comes from Baidu, and I believed it at first too. But after checking the official announcement, I need to correct that here: DeepSeek clearly states it uses its self-developed search engine long-term, so you can't directly attribute the good results to a Baidu partnership.

What struck me most this time is that adding the ability for Agents to find and read material genuinely improves the real experience a lot. It also takes less time maintaining search infrastructure, letting me put energy back into my own features.

Anyway, this update, I'm sold.

Here's the implementation result and the comparison effect, what do you say?

Previously I was toiling away on search tooling myself; now Liang Sheng directly serves up the API.

Liang Sheng, I admit I was a bit loud to you before! 😭

This time it's really stepping up for Agent developers. Everyone, try it now! 🔥