Alternatives to the Google Search API

Question

If someone searches for a keyword on our website, we currently pull in Google's search results. We have done this using Google's standard search API with no real issues so far.

However, we noticed that a number of searches weren't going through. So it turns out, that Google is phasing out this API and pushing people to a different API:

https://code.google.com/apis/customsearch/v1/overview.html#Pricing

The new API is more limited than what we've worked with, and also costs a lot of money given our usage.

We've recently also looked into Yahoo! Boss:

http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/

Does anyone have any suggestions on other APIs or providers to use here?

As I mentioned, we're not looking for a freebie but maybe something with more competitive pricing. If you can share experience using Boss or Bing, that would be great too.

Just to make sure: I'm not looking for a software solution (e.g. Lucene and related, Elastic Search, etc.).

Solution 1

We went ahead and used Yahoo! Boss for now.

UPDATE: YAHOO BOSS SEARCH API will discontinue on March 31, 2016.

Solution 2

There is free Bing search API for this.

Solution 3

Dont know if there is already a professional support, but yacy serves an API ( http://yacy.net/en/API.html ) and you can easily influence the re-crawling of sites, if you set up an own yacy node.

Solution 4

You could try indextank. It's a hosted, real-time search solution.

View more solutions

Comments

[Till]

Interesting link, but more or less a search engine I could plug into. I needed something like Google Search or Yahoo! Boss. Still interesting, so I voted.

[dbuthay]

Do you want results from sites you control, right? Or from any site / domain? I'm working on a GoogleCustomSearch-like solution using indextank. You just add a link to a js on your templates, and I'll index your site. After that, you just add indextank-jquery to your site, and you're good to go

[Till]

No, I want(ed) web search - nothing like inurl:example.org.

[Muhammad Imran Tariq]

Yahoo! Boss is no longer free. So what could be the free alternative?

[Till]

We were not looking for free since we paid for the Google Search API already. I don't know if there is anything that is free. The pricing on Boss is very reasonable though.

[Till]

Add a link to that search API and some info to make your answer worthwhile. :)

[davide]

In my experience, yacy seems still very immature, providing prevalently irrelevant or unfocussed results.

[Uncaught Exception]

With Faroo, your API key is restricted to the IP address you specify during registration.

[Christian Romeni]

This is not free anymore is it? Or am I just not getting to the right spot...?