Legacy Search to Exa Migration

Overview

Migrate a legacy web-search integration to Exa through semantic, filter, freshness, relevance, cost, and rollback comparisons. Treat credentials, queries, retrieved content, generated output, spend, and destructive state as separately governed boundaries.

Prerequisites

• The target repository, environment, Exa team, product surface, and accountable owner.
• The workload's data classification, latency and freshness promise, cost ceiling, and retention policy.
• Current first-party documentation plus credentials only for a narrowly approved live check.

Current Contract

Exa publishes a Bing migration guide, but provider fields and ranking semantics are not one-to-one. Exa Search supports domain, date, category, location, moderation, content, and deep-synthesis controls. Migration acceptance must evaluate the application outcome rather than translate parameters mechanically.

Authentication

For normal REST work, inject EXA_API_KEY from an approved server-side secret manager and send it only as Authorization: Bearer to the configured first-party Exa API host. Team Management service keys, hosted MCP OAuth or enterprise managed authorization, and payment-protocol calls are separate trust models. Never print, commit, place in a URL, or expose a credential to an untrusted client.