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by thimabi 361 days ago
Unfortunately 100 queries per day is quite low for LLMs, which tend to average 5-10 searches per prompt in my experience. And paying for the search API doesn’t seem to be worth it compared to something like a ChatGPT subscription.
2 comments
gkbrk 361 days ago
You're not limited to 100 queries per day though. You're limited to 10,000 queries per day.
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thimabi 360 days ago
> Custom Search JSON API provides 100 search queries per day for free. If you need more, you may sign up for billing in the API Console. Additional requests cost $5 per 1000 queries, up to 10k queries per day.

What I meant is that pricing for 10k queries per day does not make sense instead of a simple $20/month ChatGPT subscription.

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scrivna 360 days ago
10k queries would cost $50/day
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gkbrk 360 days ago
If you actually did 10k queries a day with any free search service you'd quickly find yourself banned.

ChatGPT deep research does a lot of searches, but it's also heavily rate-limited even on paid accounts.

Building a search index, running a lot of servers, storing and querying all that data costs money. Even a cheap search API is gonna cost a bit for 10k queries if the results are any good.

Kagi charges me 15 USD and last month I've done 863 searches with it, more than worth it for the result quality. For me the Google API would be cheaper. I'm pretty sure Kagi would kick me out if I did 10k searches a day even if I'm paying for "unlimited searches".

A similar API from Bing costs between 15-25 USD for 1000 searches. Exa.ai costs 5 dollars for 1000 searches, and it goes up to 25 dollars if you want more than 25 results for your query.

Good web search is quite expensive.

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sadeshmukh 361 days ago
The Google programmable search engine is unlimited and can search the web: https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/
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yorwba 361 days ago
That's intended for human users. If you try to use it for automated requests, you'll get banned for botting fairly quickly.
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sadeshmukh 360 days ago
They have a 10k/day API. I'm sure that's enough for one person.
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yorwba 360 days ago
That's the one that's described upthread as "paying for the search API doesn’t seem to be worth it."
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