HN Explorer

Ask HN: Does anyone find Google "search API" rate limiting annoying?

8 points by shail ↗ HN
I am feeling a lot of anger over Google's decision to rate limit searches done through APIs. Earlier it was free but there were some conditions such as you cannot change the order of the search etc.

But now, the same search is not free anymore and on top of thats its bloody expensive ($5 for 1000 queries). Is there any alternative (I don't know why I am asking this question, I know the answer already. There are none.) I personally feel that Google's data belongs to public as much as it belongs to Google. Its the public which has made it so valuable.

Obvisouly I do not see a problem if they charge for commercial usage but they should not restrict its usage for the opensource and freely distributed software. In fact such usage will only enrich the search data further.

Interesting links: https://developers.google.com/web-search/docs/ https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview

16 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 12.6 ms ] thread
jzox
There are some alternatives, but it really depends what you need it for?
ig1
Obviously it will cost Google (or whoever else) money to provide such an API, and without any revenue from it, what would be justification for providing such a service ?

If Google's API is too expensive for you maybe you should consider the Bing API (which is around $2/1000 queries). Alternatively if you want to roll your own search you can access the Common Crawl on AWS and pay for the processing cost directly.

shail
They can continue to put the same restriction that: 1) I cannot change the search result order 2) I cannot remove the ads embedded in the result and need to show the whole thing. That will provide the justification.
ig1
If that's an economically viable model, why not just insert your own ads and use that to cover the cost of the API ?
shail
I am trying to build a free software (open source), so I guess what you are suggesting is another company in itself. For obvious reasons I cannot attempt to do that while trying to build a utility tool. Where will I get ads from? Google obviously. I will still have to pay for the margin. Search business works on volume, I am not sure whether the tool will be that useful that it will attract that kind of volume to get supported through ads. I think I am not putting it correctly in words but its not possible to do what you're suggesting.
bond
I was going to develop an app based on google search API but with those restrictions it's impossible to do anything serious...
shail
Exactly, I think there are tons of innovation getting blocked because of this restriction. I mean 100 queries a day, that's is ridiculously low to be able to do even some proof of concept.
pilooch
Other players, like blekko, may be more willing to open their API. Ask them directly.
greglindahl
There are a bunch of free and open-source apps using blekko's search API. We do ask that you keep free usage down below 1 query per second, and the free API results are not as good as the ones on blekko.com or the izik tablet search app, but you're free to rearrange the results and do other things that you can't do with other search APIs. Contact us at apiauth@blekko.com for details.
shail
Hey Greg,

Thanks for replying. The use case which I am considering requires instant like search which google offers. I would like to speak to you 1-on-1 and see if you could help me get such an access through blekko. I know its a huge technical challenge to implement something like instant search and if blekko does not already have it, but may be I could share my idea with you and see if there is a possibility. My email id is in my profile. Please send me an email if you are open to discuss further.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
will_brown
In 2010 I developed a search engine using Google's API(Search 2.0?), after launching I had to scrap the search engine and start over with Bing API because queries accumulated over 300k the first 4 days. Contrary to another poster who says Bing API now charges, at that time Bing's API was unlimited - you may want to personally research Bing API queries limit.

Long term, be wary search API's have notoriously left developers high and dry when releasing new versions. Old API versions get deprecated and are not compatible with new versions, you need a new key API which requires coding your engine from the beginning again.