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.).

Answer 1

We went ahead and used Yahoo! Boss for now.

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

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

If you are looking for a java-library, have a look at this. The library is basically a wrapper for the Faroo search-api which is for free.

Answer 4

There is free Bing search API for this.

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

Gigablast offers a web search api that is less expensive than the major search players, but still over a billion pages. More info here:

http://www.gigablast.com/searchfeed.html