By Gilbert Pagayon
Publication Date: 2026-09-26 04:31:00
The small pause that grows into a long wait
Ask an AI assistant one question and it may search the web once. Ask it to compare products, check claims, gather sources and write a report, and it may search dozens of times. Each call takes time. Each call costs money. Those little pauses can become the longest part of the job.
Perplexity wants to shrink them. The company has introduced Fast Search, a lower-cost option for developers using its Search API. It runs on Photon, a new retrieval and ranking engine that Perplexity built in Rust. In the company’s measurements, a Fast Search call took 160 milliseconds at the median and 230 milliseconds at the 95th percentile. In plain English, Perplexity says 95% of the measured calls finished within 230 milliseconds.
That sounds like a blink. For an AI agent making repeated searches, it could feel more like removing a string of red lights from a trip across town.
A date correction: I placed this story in the previous roundup’s 24-hour window. Perplexity dates both its Photon research post and its Fast Search announcement 24 September 2026, so that placement was incorrect.
First, what is actually new?
Perplexity did not just launch its Search API. It introduced that API in September 2025, giving developers a way to request ranked web results for their own applications. Fast…
