Webhook vs. Polling for Search Results
Tradeoffs between push-based webhooks and pull-based polling for search-driven monitoring.
What it means
Polling means your system repeatedly asks 'anything new?' on a fixed interval, which is simple to implement but wastes calls when nothing has changed and can miss events between polls if the interval is too coarse. A webhook means the provider (or a monitoring service built on top of one) pushes a notification to your endpoint only when something relevant actually happens, eliminating wasted checks but requiring you to run a reliably reachable receiving endpoint.
In practice
A news-monitoring feature polling every 15 minutes for brand mentions makes up to 96 calls a day even on days with zero new coverage; a webhook-based equivalent (where supported) only fires when a genuinely new mention appears, which can mean a handful of calls on a quiet day and near-instant notification on a busy one.
Tradeoffs
Few search API providers offer true webhooks directly, since search results aren't inherently event-driven the way a database change is — most 'push' monitoring products are actually polling on the provider's side and pushing to you, which means the underlying latency floor is still set by how often the provider itself re-checks, not truly instantaneous.