Search Is How Agents See the World
Agents rely on search as their primary interface to the world, but stale search results are a correctness problem rather than just a UX annoyance. The core challenge is maintaining computed search documents (denormalized entities assembled from joins, aggregates, pricing logic, and embeddings) as underlying source systems change. Batch reprocessing introduces lag; hand-rolled CDC pipelines are brittle and complex. Materialize addresses this by letting teams define computed entities as SQL views that are continuously maintained as inputs change, then propagating entity-level before-and-after diffs downstream. A companion open-source tool, Perfect Embedding, sits as a Kafka Connect SMT between Materialize and the search index, regenerating vector embeddings only when the fields that drive semantic meaning actually change.