Alternative to the deprecated google REST web search API

Question

I have been using the Google Websearch API for over 1 year now. The service was deprecated in Nov 2010 but continues to provide results to date. More recently, google has started to enforce the 1,000 queries (?) per day limit on this deprecated service. I swear, last month I made over 10,000 API calls in one day without any errors from the service (same IP, same API key).

So I guess my question is has anyone found an alternative yet? I know yahoo boss is pretty good but I am working exclusively on Google for my projects. I do not mind spending money for for this service either as long as i can get 64 results from Google.

On that thought, how are services like Zoomrank able to bypass all Google limits? I have a subscription with Zoomrank and I can get daily rankings for all my keywords. Do they have a tie-up with Google or are they just accessing some secret service I don't know about.

Some people have suggested the new Google custom search, but i dont know how does that help me search the web? Google CS is limited to the CSE you create and searches within those engines. If I am looking for web results for Pizza, Google CS doesnt help me.

Thanks for your input. Much appreciated

Diatonic

I have the same question for Google Image search API. That has been deprecated also. – Peptize

Answer 1

UPDATE: @ggez44 points to some official Google documentation of the solution described below here: http://support.google.com/customsearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1210656

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You can use the Google Custom Search Engine to search the entire web.

In brief:

1. Create a CSE that searches a single site (e.g. google.com)
2. In the CSE control panel's Basics section, set to "Search the entire web but emphasize certain sites"
3. In the Sites section, delete the single site that you added when you created the CSE

Full details here:

• http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/customsearch/thread?tid=56c0bd92dda351b7&hl=en&fid=56c0bd92dda351b7000495e3f500d83f

Once that's implemented, you can enable billing in the Google API Console at a CPM of $5, to a total of 10,000 queries.

• Google API Console: https://code.google.com/apis/console/
• Pricing: https://code.google.com/apis/customsearch/v1/overview.html#Pricing

Goodtempered

Thanks for this. I remember reading about this earlier, but when I last tried, it wouldnt let me check off all the custom sites. Much appreciated. – Diatonic

I've just tried this and it doesn't seem to work anymore. This is annoying, all we want it the results returned from what would be a normal google.com search. It's so hard to find. – Myrna

Just a note: the results can be completely different than google.com. I found this out the hard way after much time building an app. – Phagy

I guess this doesn't work any more - tried several times now. When I remove all sites from Sites it doesn't produce serach results. – Cardoso

just a fyi, i was able to remove all custom sites and get results for both web and images across the entire web. in fact this seems like it's actually known and supported by google: support.google.com/customsearch/bin/… – Defamatory