AI tool comparison
Exa vs last30days-skill
Which one should you ship with? Here is the side-by-side panel verdict, pricing read, reviewer split, and community vote comparison.
Search & Research
Exa
AI-native search API — semantic search for LLM applications
100%
Panel ship
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Community
Free
Entry
Exa is a search API built for AI applications. Unlike Google's keyword matching, Exa understands meaning — search for concepts, find similar content, and get clean text extraction from any URL. Used by AI agents for web research.
Research Tools
last30days-skill
Research any topic across 10+ platforms from the last 30 days
75%
Panel ship
—
Community
Free
Entry
last30days-skill is an AI agent skill that aggregates, deduplicates, and synthesizes recent discussions about any topic from Reddit, X/Twitter, YouTube, Hacker News, Polymarket, Bluesky, TikTok, and Instagram simultaneously. The core value proposition: instead of manually searching eight platforms and stitching together what people are actually saying, you ask once and get a grounded summary with citations ranked by engagement and cross-platform convergence. The ranking system is unusually sophisticated for a community project—it combines text similarity, engagement velocity, source authority, and cross-platform convergence detection (penalizing topics that only appear on one platform). For prediction markets, it evaluates topics as outcomes within broader events rather than naive title matching. A handle resolution feature identifies X/Twitter accounts from natural language names alone. Zero configuration is needed for Reddit, HN, and Polymarket; unlocking other sources requires API keys from ScrapeCreators and Exa. The project reached 18k stars in its first week, largely driven by prompt researchers discovering it surfaces "what actually works" for tools like ChatGPT or Midjourney. Results auto-save to ~/Documents/Last30Days/ by default, and a watchlist mode supports scheduled topic monitoring with an external cron scheduler.
Reviewer scorecard
“The API is exactly what AI agents need — semantic search that returns clean, structured content instead of HTML soup. Integrated it into our agent pipeline in an hour.”
“The cross-platform convergence scoring is clever—topics that only trend on one platform get penalized, which filters out astroturfing and PR-driven hype. The handle resolution for X accounts is a nice touch for competitive intelligence workflows where you know a person's name but not their handle.”
“Better than Google Custom Search for AI use cases. The text extraction alone saves you from building a scraping pipeline. Pricing is reasonable for the value.”
“Most of the headline platforms require paid API keys from ScrapeCreators to actually work, so the 'zero-config' claim is misleading—you get Reddit and HN out of the box, which is not exactly a revelation. The 18k stars look suspiciously like another viral GitHub moment that won't translate to sustained usage.”
“Exa is building the search layer for the agentic web. As AI agents need to research and gather information, Exa becomes essential infrastructure.”
“The watchlist mode with scheduled monitoring is the feature that turns this from a one-off research tool into genuine trend intelligence infrastructure. As public discourse increasingly happens in fragmented, platform-specific bubbles, multi-source aggregation with convergence detection becomes essential signal.”
“For content creators trying to find what's actually resonating versus what's being pushed, the engagement velocity scoring is invaluable. Knowing that a prompt technique has 1000 upvotes spread over a week versus 1000 upvotes in 2 hours tells you completely different things about audience authenticity.”
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