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by landyman 5462 days ago
Google has told me (and other users of the now deprecated AJAX Search API) to switch to their paid Custom Search API.

The new API is missing some features that were in the old API, which is unfortunate. And, also unfortunate, the most accurate Google results (Local, Web, Image, etc.) come from scraping in ways like this article describes. Hopefully, Google will address these issues in its Custom Search API. If they don't many people will still continue to scrape.
1 comments
wslh 5462 days ago
But the Google Custom Search API is a different thing. It's a search based on a set of sites. What's important is to have an API to search for the "whole" indexed Internet, and Google is the most advanced search engine in town. If you play with more complex queries you quickly note the difference between Google and Bing, Yahoo or Blekko.
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landyman 5462 days ago
Yes, which is what we thought too. But, you can setup a "custom search engine" with some default site (we used www.google.com), then change the settings to that it uses the entire web, and remove the site that you originally put in.

The Bing and Yahoo APIs are definitely a lot better, IMO. But, as long as Google wants me to use their Custom Search API, then that's what I'll use.

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