# Keep AnySearch despite no independent quality benchmark

AnySearch is retained as a search provider (and the vertical-search provider) even though its result quality has no independent, third-party benchmark — unlike Tavily (SimpleQA SOTA 93.3%) and Exa (Cursor/Notion usage, Newscatcher benchmarks). This is an accepted risk, not an oversight.

The reason AnySearch cannot be replaced: it is the only provider in the stack offering structured vertical search (e.g. `finance.us_stock`, `academic.search`, `security.scan`) — returning structured data fields for finance/CVE/academic queries rather than generic web result lists. Tavily and Exa do not offer this. Removing AnySearch would collapse finance/CVE/academic queries from structured vertical results into generic web search, losing the extension's core differentiation for those intents.

The risk is mitigated by documentation, not by a quality-gate mechanism: `promptGuidelines` and the skill note that AnySearch vertical results are not independently benchmarked and should be cross-checked by the LLM/user for plausibility. A threshold-based quality gate (rejecting low-score results) or parallel multi-source merging was rejected — without benchmark data there is no principled threshold, and parallel queries would triple quota consumption on free tiers. If a benchmarked provider with equivalent vertical capability emerges, AnySearch can be reconsidered.