Launch HN: Webhound (YC S23) – Research agent that builds datasets from the web

We were heavily inspired by tools like Cursor - basically tried to prioritize user control and visibility above everything else.

What we discovered during iteration was that our users are usually domain experts who know exactly what they want. The more we showed them what was happening under the hood and gave them control over the process, the better their results got.

Instead of just search query → final result (though you can do that too), you can step in and guide it. Tell it exactly where to look, what sources to check, how to dig deeper, how to use its notepad.

We've found this gets you way better results that actually match what you're looking for, as well as being a more satisfying user experience for people who already know how they would do the job themselves. Plus it lets you tap into niche datasets that wouldn't show up with just generic search queries.

This is definitely something we need to address on our end. Site owners should have clear ways to opt out, and crawlers should be identifiable. We're looking into either working with Firecrawl to improve this or potentially switching to a solution that gives us more control over respecting these standards.

Appreciate you bringing this up.

If it isn't doing that in your session, you can usually just step in and tell it to and it will follow your instructions.

A few design decisions we made that turned out pretty interesting:

1. We gave it an analyze results function. When the agent is on a search results page, instead of visiting each page one by one, it can just ask "What are the pricing models?" and get answers from all search results in parallel.

2. Long web pages get broken into chunks with navigation hints so the agent always knows where it is and can jump around without overloading its context ("continue reading", "jump to middle", etc.).

3. For sites that are commonly visited but have messy layouts or spread out information, we built custom tool calls that let the agent request specific info that might be scattered on different pages and consolidates it all into one clean text response.

4. We're adding DOM interaction via text in the next couple of days, so the agent can click buttons, fill forms, enter keys, but everything still comes back as structured text instead of screenshots.

We've been having similar thoughts about pricing and offering unlimited, but since it is feasible for us in the short term due to credits we enjoy offering that option to early users, even if it may be a bit naive.

Having said that, we are currently working on a pilot with a company whom we are offering live updates, and they are paying per usage since they don't want to have to set it up themselves, so we can definitely see the demand there. We also offer an API for companies that want to reliably query the same thing at a preset cadence, which is also usage based.

For crawling we use Firecrawl. They handle most of the blocking issues and proxies.

We use Gemini 2.5 Flash which is already pretty cheap, so inference costs are actually not as high as they would seem given the number of steps. Our architecture allows for small models like that to operate well enough, and we think those kinds of models will only get cheaper.

Having said all that, we are working on improving latency and allowing for more parallelization wherever possible and hope to include that in future versions, especially for enrichment. We do think that one of the weaknesses of the product is for mass collection - it's better at finding medium sized datasets from siloed sources and less good at getting large comprehensive datasets, but we're also considering approaches that incorporate more traditional scraping tactics for finding these large datasets.

Working on better task classification upfront to route simple requests more directly.

> I noticed you mentioned that "MCP stands for model context protocol." My current understanding, based on the initial problem description and the articles I've been reviewing, is that MCP refers to "Managed Care Plan." This is important because the entire schema and extraction plan are built around "Managed Care Plans."

Session ID: fcd1edb8-7b3c-480e-a352-ed6528556a63

Interestingly, we're working with B2B clients right now where we use Webhound to curate and then act as the "validation" layer ourselves. The agent lets us offer these datasets way cheaper with live updates, but still with human oversight.

We're working on better query interpretation, but in the meantime you could try being more specific like "find BoardDocs or meeting document websites for each district" to guide it better. Also, you can usually figure out how it interpreted your request by looking at the entity criteria, those are all the criteria a piece of data needs to meet to make it in the set.

That's really strange, it sounds like Webhound for some reason deleted the schema after extraction ended, so although your data should still be tied to the session it just isn't being displayed. Definitely not the expected behavior.

Regarding Reddit, we have our own custom handler for Reddit URLs which uses the Reddit API, which we are billed for when we exceed free limits.

For Terms of Service, you're right, that is definitely an oversight on our part. We just published both our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy on the website.

When it comes to comparing with GPT-5 and Claude, we do believe that our prompting, agent orchestration, and other core parts of the product such as parallel search results analysis and parallel agents are improvements on just GPT-5 and Claude, while also allowing it to run at much cheaper costs on significantly smaller models. Our v1 which we built months ago was essentially the same as what GPT-5 thinking with web search currently does, and we've since made the explicit choice to focus on data quality, user controllability, and cost efficiency over latency. So while yes, it might give faster results and work better for smaller datasets, both we and our users have found Webhound to work better for siloed sources and larger datasets.

Regarding account deletion, that is also a fair point. So far we've had people email us when they want their account deleted, but we will add account deletion ASAP.

Criticism like this helps us continue to hold ourselves to a high standard, so thanks for taking the time to write it up.