Sources
Perplexity ships Fast Search on Photon, a Rust retrieval engine built by a small team plus hundreds of agents for about $300K in tokens
On 2026-09-24 Perplexity launched Fast Search in its Search API. It runs on Photon, a new Rust retrieval and ranking service that replaces a modified open-source engine, and returns 95% of results in 230 ms or less (160 ms median). Perplexity says internal p99 fell from about 800 ms to 65 ms on 20% fewer machines, and Fast Search costs $1 per 1,000 requests against $5 for standard search, with a 68% lower cost per task across six agentic benchmarks. It is a concrete production case of agents writing core infrastructure, and a cheaper search call for agents that search dozens of times per task.
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