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Yes. The Bing Search API is priced at $15/1k queries in the cheapest tier, Brave API is $9 at the non-toy tier, Google's pricing for a general search API is un

by jsnell 1y ago

Yes. The Bing Search API is priced at $15/1k queries in the cheapest tier, Brave API is $9 at the non-toy tier, Google's pricing for a general search API is unknown but their Search grounding in Gemini costs $35/1k queries. Search API prices have been going up, not down, over time. The opposite of LLMs, which have gotten 1000x cheaper over the last two years.

jwr 1y ago
> 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.
- formercoder 1y ago
  I work at Google but not on this. We do offer Gemini with Google Search grounding which is similar to a search API.
  - QuadmasterXLII 1y ago
    ??????
  - teeklp 1y ago
    How much do you pay people to use this?
- jsnell 1y ago
  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 They indeed do not publish anything about it.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.
- camkego 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    "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.
ColinHayhurst 1y ago
Excuse the self-promotion but Mojeek is £3/1,000: https://www.mojeek.com/services/search/web-search-api/ https://www.mojeek.com/services/search/web-search-api/
- firtoz 1y ago
  > Can I store data obtained through the API? > You can store results on Business plan and optionally on the Enterprise plan. For other plans, you may store the results for 1 hour to enable caching. Curious... I can understand that this may be a defensive action, however, feels unenforceable. And in some cases impractical for the user, after seeing this I may keep looking for alternatives for example because it's not clear to me if I have a chat history that has the search results in one of the messages, do I have to have a kind of mechanism to clean those out or something?

by jsnell 1y ago

jwr 1y ago

> 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.

formercoder 1y ago
I work at Google but not on this. We do offer Gemini with Google Search grounding which is similar to a search API.
- QuadmasterXLII 1y ago
  ??????
- teeklp 1y ago
  How much do you pay people to use this?
jsnell 1y ago
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.
camkego 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  "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.

ColinHayhurst 1y ago

Excuse the self-promotion but Mojeek is £3/1,000: https://www.mojeek.com/services/search/web-search-api/ https://www.mojeek.com/services/search/web-search-api/

firtoz 1y ago
> Can I store data obtained through the API? > You can store results on Business plan and optionally on the Enterprise plan. For other plans, you may store the results for 1 hour to enable caching. Curious... I can understand that this may be a defensive action, however, feels unenforceable. And in some cases impractical for the user, after seeing this I may keep looking for alternatives for example because it's not clear to me if I have a chat history that has the search results in one of the messages, do I have to have a kind of mechanism to clean those out or something?