[jwr]

> Google's pricing for a general search API

As I discovered recently, and much to my surprise, Google does not offer a "general search API", at least not officially.

There is a "custom search" API that sounds like web search, but isn't: it offers a subset of the index, which is not immediately apparent. Confusing and misleading labeling there.

Bing offers something a bit better, but I recently ended up trying the Kagi API, and it is the best thing I found so far. Expensive ($25/1000), but works well.

[jsnell]

There are multiple search engines known to be based on Google's API (Startpage, Leta, Kagi), so that product definitely exists. But it exciting that's all we know. They indeed do not publish anything about it. We don't know the price, the terms, or even the name.

[formercoder]

I work at Google but not on this. We do offer Gemini with Google Search grounding which is similar to a search API.

[QuadmasterXLII]

??????

[teeklp]

How much do you pay people to use this?

[camkego]

Do you have any references to the point that the Google Custom Search API is for a subset of the regular Google search index?

[ricw]

No reference here but found this out the hard way too. Google search Ali is Utterly useless in fact and entirely different search results vs using the web. Bing is better. Haven’t tried ksgi yet

[jwr]

"References"? :-) This is a corporation we're talking about, and Google at that. Layers upon layers of obscurity, "strategic decisions" and discontinued products.

Try it and you'll see — there is no official Search API and the Custom Search API is quite poor and not usable in most scenarios.