A person searches to browse. An agent searches to act. That one difference changes the whole API.
When you search for a company, you get a page of ten results and your eyes do the rest. You know which "Acme" you meant. You click the right one. The ambiguity was never the search engine's problem, it was yours, and you solved it in half a second without noticing.
An agent can't do that. Hand it ten Acmes and it has to guess, or stop and ask, or worse, pick the wrong one and enrich a company you've never heard of. Search built for people leans on a human to disambiguate at the end. Search built for agents has to remove the ambiguity up front.
So abm.dev's Search has two doors.
Exact, when you know something hard. Give it a domain or an email and you get the one company or the one person, resolved, no page of maybes. This is the door an agent should reach for whenever it can, because a domain is unambiguous and a name never is.
Fuzzy, when you're still looking. By keyword, across LinkedIn and the web: the companies in a segment, the people in a role, the posts on a topic. This is the top of the funnel, where you don't yet have the domain, and it's honest about being a starting point, not an answer.
And then the verb people forget: sourcing the buying committee. Give it a company and a role, who runs RevOps at the account you're chasing, and it goes and finds them, as an async job, and hands back candidates with their profiles. Not a database lookup. A search that runs, the way a good rep would, then comes back.
Here's why it matters. Search is the first verb, and everything downstream inherits its mistakes. Enrich the wrong person and you get beautiful, cited, confident data about a stranger. Create outreach off that and you've emailed the wrong human on your behalf. The whole chain is only as good as whether Search returned the thing you actually meant.
That's why we made it resolve, not just retrieve. One key, one call, and the answer is a real entity you can hand straight to Enrich, not a list you have to babysit.
If you're building an agent that acts on who it finds, come make it prove it finds the right one. There's a free playground at abm.dev, and LAUNCHCODES puts about twenty in credits on your account. Search an account you know cold and see if it comes back with the one you meant.
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