The prices of search APIs has increased significantly in the past several years, even if you correct for inflation. I suspect part of this is increased use of M

The prices of search APIs has increased significantly in the past several years, even if you correct for inflation. I suspect part of this is increased use of ML/AI in search, so comparing LLMs to search APIs isn't as different as it might initially appear. It also isn't a very competitive market, so I would expect margins to be fairly high. There has also been restrictions on API usage. In the case of google, they put in place a hard cap on the number of requests you can make in a month, and it isn't that hard to hit it, and you can't buy more usage for any price. And the Bing API is going to be shuttered by the end of the summer. I don't really know the reason for making it hard to use an API, but it does suggest that the price is artificially high to discourage use for whatever reason search engines don't want people to use their API for. : except maybe if you set up some special deal with google that probably requires you to know someone high up at google.