> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.snipex.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Introduction

> What Snippex is and why it exists

## What is Snippex?

Snippex is a **search API that returns relevant text snippets** from each result — not just URLs and titles.

When you run a web search, you get back a list of links. To actually use that information in an application, you have to fetch and parse each page, extract the relevant parts, and rank them — all of which takes time, infrastructure, and significant engineering effort.

Snippex does all of that in a single API call.

```bash theme={null}
POST https://api.snipex.dev/v1/search
```

You send a query. You get back ranked results, each containing **verbatim passages** from the source page that are relevant to your query, along with a relevance score.

***

## What you can build

* **AI pipelines** — feed grounded, relevant content directly into your prompts instead of raw web pages
* **Research tools** — surface specific information from across the web without building a crawler
* **Knowledge bases** — ingest fresh, sourced content at query time
* **Answer engines** — build products that cite and quote their sources

***

## How it differs from a standard search API

|                        | Standard search API              | Snippex                                       |
| ---------------------- | -------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------- |
| Returns                | URLs, titles, short descriptions | URLs, titles + **verbatim relevant passages** |
| Requires page fetching | Yes — you must crawl each result | No — content is extracted for you             |
| Relevance scoring      | Result-level                     | **Snippet-level** (0.0–1.0 per passage)       |
| Ready for RAG/AI use   | No — needs preprocessing         | Yes — plug directly into prompts              |

***

## Next steps

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Quickstart" icon="bolt" href="/quickstart">
    Make your first API call in under 2 minutes
  </Card>

  <Card title="Authentication" icon="key" href="/authentication">
    Get your API key and authenticate requests
  </Card>

  <Card title="Search depth" icon="sliders" href="/concepts/search-depth">
    Understand precise, balanced, and exhaustive modes
  </Card>

  <Card title="API Reference" icon="code" href="/api-reference/search">
    Full parameter and response documentation
  </Card>
</CardGroup>