Introducing Octen News Search: Live. Trusted. Deduplicated.

Ask it about last night's game, this morning's breaking story, or an announcement a company made an hour ago, and it has only one option: search. News is the most frequent and least negotiable search need a model has, yet it's the one most search products handle most carelessly. Most web search services refresh their indexes on cycles measured in hours. Some don't maintain an index of their own at all.

General search + a date filter ≠ news search

Most search APIs on the market have no real news endpoint. What gets labeled "news search" is usually general web results with a time window or category filter on top. The index, ranking and deduplication underneath are the same as general search.

But news isn't just another web page. It's produced differently, updated on a different rhythm, and varies far more in quality. Put general search on top of news, and AI falls short in four ways:

1. Too slow. News is relevant for minutes, not hours. Between publication and searchability sit discovery, parsing, ingestion and indexing, and general-purpose crawlers run on cycles of hours or even days. By the time a story reaches the index, the AI is already answering with old news. And user attention peaks right after something happens.

2. Unreliable. One event can have dozens or hundreds of sources, and their credibility varies wildly. Original reporting, portal syndication and content-farm rewrites carry roughly equal weight in general search. The AI is left to vet sources itself, and when it can't, it has no choice but to trust them all.

3. Redundant. A wire story gets republished across many sites within minutes, so half of the top ten results can be the same article. The AI reads every copy, burns tokens on duplicate text, and walks away with one piece of information.

4. Text-only. News comes with photos, audio and video that help people understand what happened. Today, AI retrieves almost nothing but text.

None of this can be fixed by tuning parameters. It takes a search system built specifically for news. That's why we're launching Octen News Search, the newest member of the Octen Premier family.

Searching "apple" in Octen News Search: the core event, plus follow-up developments on the same story.

From published to searchable in 1–3 minutes

When a major outlet breaks a story, it's searchable in Octen News within three minutes.

We tested four breaking stories side by side. On average, Octen's most recent relevant result had been published just 150 seconds earlier. Other products ranged from 1.3 to 6.6 hours.

One detail is easy to miss: Perplexity and Parallel timestamp results only to the day. An 8 a.m. report and a 10 p.m. report are two different stories, yet to an agent they look identical. Timing is a basic element of news, and rounding it to a date throws that element away.

95% of the world's major outlets, and a sense of who to trust

Octen News Search covers 95% of the world's major news outlets. That includes wire services, national broadcasters, leading newspapers, financial press and key regional media, across 200+ countries and regions and 100+ languages, with cross-language search and language filtering.

On top of that breadth, we judge authority. We score every source and every story for authority and originality, and surface the more reliable reporting that's closer to the original source first. The AI can use the results as they come back, with no extra pass to check where they came from.

Not a list of links, but the full arc of a story

Search for a person, a company or a topic that's been unfolding for months, and Octen News Search doesn't return ten scattered links. It returns stories organized by event.

Each story is a complete thread: what happened, plus coverage from every angle. As the story develops, updates attach as sub-events. One search lays out the whole arc from origin to today. The AI can grasp the big picture or zero in on exactly the part the question is about.

The latest developments come first, so ongoing tracking means reading only what's new. Every story and sub-event is deduplicated by originality and authority, so the same article never shows up twice.

The same query across six search engines. Octen News's top ten results are ten independent reports. On each of the other five engines, four to five of the top ten are duplicates, so a meaningful share of tokens goes to re-reading the same text.

News is more than text

A story's lead image and inline photos are part of the information. A photo from the scene, a screenshot of an earnings table or a frame from a match often says more than any paragraph.

Along with the text, Octen News Search returns each story's lead image, inline images and other multimodal data. AI can use them directly in its responses, so users see the picture next to the answer and get a fuller sense of what happened.

Get started

News Search is available to all users today, with every feature above enabled by default.

Integration is a single POST request to https://api.octen.ai/news-search. Already using Octen or another web search API? Point your requests at this endpoint and you're done.

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