Web Search API that permits automated queries

Question

Are there any web search APIs or search engines that allow automated queries?

Answer 1

Engines that offer paid service terms:

• Gigablast

Engines that offer limited free service:

• Google (100 per day)
• Bingᴿ (5,000 per month)

Engines that offer free service:

• FAROOᴿ
• YaCy (P2P)

ᴿ Registration required

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Deprecated, obsolete, or no longer exist:

• DuckDuckGo
• Yahoo
• AltaVista
• DogPile
• Ask.com
• Ixquick
• ScrubTheWeb (uses CAPTCHA)
• Blekko
• Yahoo! BOSS

Answer 2

There is a nice list of APIs for search engines at programmableweb

Answer 3

Both Yahoo and Google allow automated queries, for a fee. You can read about Google's Custom Search API here:

http://code.google.com/apis/customsearch/v1/overview.html

It offers 100 free queries per day and thereafter $5 per 1000 queries, up to 10,000 queries per day. Yahoo's BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) service is described here:

http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/

They charge 80 cents per 1000 queries, or 40 cents per 1000 queries for their limited index with slower refresh.

I don't know of any other service providing custom search for a fee but would be glad to hear about them.

Answer 4

I highly recommend YACY, it has clean api, I have created a small tutorial on how to create a YACY client, please feel free to modify the code to your liking, let us know if the code can be improved. You can view the code in the following url http://symvc.com/media/article/25/show.

I have been searching for a search engine until I found it, yacy is free and absolutely no strings attached. You can use it for a single website, you can make it for as many websites as you want, you can do many things with it.