DeepSeek, a Chinese company, launched its in-house search engine and Search API for developers on Oct. 17, detailing features designed to combat digital spam.
The new service aims to provide developers with access to web search capabilities, including mechanisms to filter out low-quality content, while also raising questions about its underlying partnerships and data handling.
DeepSeek stated its search engine filters content such as SEO spam, geographic manipulation, and AI-generated text deemed to be of low quality. The company did not provide a definition for what constitutes “GEO manipulation” in its launch materials.
Results from the Search API include an authority tier, ranging from 0 to 4, and a rerank score, from 0 to 3. DeepSeek has not yet clarified the specific criteria used to assign these scores.
The company’s privacy policy indicates that it integrates third-party APIs for its search services. It also states that user input keywords are shared with these external companies, according to the policy document.
Bocha, a search API company based in China, claimed it is the official web search supplier for DeepSeek. However, DeepSeek’s official launch pages did not reference Bocha or any other third-party partners.
Dan Petrovic, chief executive of the Australian SEO agency DEJAN, noted that DeepSeek’s approach to combating AI spam could be a significant development. Petrovic, who also founded Known Agents, a search engine tracking project, emphasized the importance of transparency in such systems.
The Search and Fetch APIs are priced at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests. DeepSeek stated its crawler respects robots.txt protocols, but the specific crawler responsible for its search index was not identified in the launch materials.
The integration of third-party services and the lack of explicit detail on how certain filtering and scoring mechanisms operate have prompted questions among industry observers regarding the new search engine’s full operational transparency.
Source: Search Engine Journal
