Google is discontinuing its free web search index for developers (heise.de)

The article suggests Common Crawl as a replacement which probably doesn’t make sense on its own due to low update frequency (monthly) and somewhat limited crawl scope.

(Looks like the sentence following the suggestion addresses this somewhat.)

Is this good for Kagi?

Good. Duck google and use other indexing.

ps. Modern AI is in reality talking web search engine imo.

I just see another small competitor becoming big by taking over

This was announced in January.

https://programmablesearchengine.googleblog.com/2026/01/upda...

Some alternative web search APIs:

Marginalia: free-ish for non-commercial use https://about.marginalia-search.com/article/api/

Brave: free for first 1000/mth, 0.5c per search https://brave.com/search/api/

Mojeek: £0.001 - £0.003 (0.1p - 0.3p) per search https://www.mojeek.com/services/search/web-search-api/

Kagi: 2.5c per search https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/search.html