Google to Shut Down Google Site Search API

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23 points·smartician··4 comments

We moved from swiftype to google site search for our website, blog and docs. It worked really well, but looks like CSE will have ads and there is no way to turn it off. Any alternatives that others are using that work well across multiple web properties?

Not sure it works across multiple properties but Algolia https://www.algolia.com/ is good. We use it for https://docs.gitlab.com/

This. It is harder and harder to use and trust anything from google besides email and search.

Here here. We implemented GSS to replace an implementation of ElasticSearch. It worked out well, and we used the JSON api provided in GSS extensively.

Looks like now they're opening up that JSON API for CSE, and that will be a paid option. The billing process seems strange, in that it's on a day-by-day basis ($5/1000 searches, maxing out at 10k searches/day).

(See pricing at the bottom): https://developers.google.com/custom-search/json-api/v1/over...

My hope is that if this pricing is correct, and the JSON API being opened up in CSE is nearly identical to the GSS version (meaning no requirements for ads), we may actually be better off financially speaking - our search load is about 1.5k/day, so it's not "huge".

I don't understand how they intend to force ads down a raw JSON API would work, or if that's the intent at all (since you're paying for the API).

Personally I always thought it was stupid to have two versions of essentially the same thing, and they're just doing what they should have done the whole time: have a free, ad-based, easy-to-implement search solution (CSE), with extra APIs you can pay for (JSON API).

Separating the two into entirely different products always seemed overwrought, IMHO.

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