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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Interesting links:
https://developers.google.com/web-search/docs/
https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview
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 ?<p>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.
You could use several alternatives.<p><a href="http://help.blekko.com/index.php/does-blekko-have-an-api/" rel="nofollow">http://help.blekko.com/index.php/does-blekko-have-an-api/</a><p><a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/boss/search/" rel="nofollow">http://developer.yahoo.com/boss/search/</a><p><a href="https://duckduckgo.com/api" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/api</a> (basically bing api but free)
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.<p>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.
Yahoo's BOSS is a great alternative:
<a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/boss/search/" rel="nofollow">http://developer.yahoo.com/boss/search/</a><p>It powers a good portion of the exciting search startup DuckDuckGo:
<a href="http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-sources" rel="nofollow">http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...</a>