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Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

programmablesearchengine.googleblog.com

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Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#12

Is this about the little Google Search Bar that is present on some websites? Or am I mistaking something

Kind of, however the Google Search Bar present on website is usually there to search across their domain, the search results are limited to their domain e.g example.com/page1, example.com/page2. Google will carry on supporting this.

What they are ending is their support for websites to search across the entire web. The websites that search across the entire web are usually niche search engine websites.

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some of the niche search engines build on Google's index affected by this?

Kagi

They published this the other day:

https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search

Which saw some discussion on HN.

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some of the niche search engines build on Google's index affected by this?

Kagi

I think Kagi buys search engine results from SERP vendors who typically scrape Google’s results and offer an API experience on top of it.

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#15

What examples are there of people using this?

There is literally thousands of independent search engines that use Programmable search to search the entire web. Many ISP providers use it on their homepage, kids-based search engines like wackysafe.com use it, also search engines that focus on privacy like gprivate.com etc

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#16

Relevant: Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708678

This might be me reading it wrong, but isn't shutting down the full-web search going against the ruling mentioned in the Kagi post?

> Google must provide Web Search Index data (URLs, crawl metadata, spam scores) at marginal cost.

Maybe they're shutting down the good integration and then Kagi, Ecosia and others can buy index data in an inconvenient way going forward?

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#17

Google quietly announced that Programmable Search (ex-Custom Search) won’t allow new engines to “search the entire web” anymore. New engines are capped at searching up to 50 domains, and existing full-web engines have until Jan 1, 2027 to transition. If you actually need whole-web search, Google now points you to an “interest form” for enterprise solutions (Vertex AI Search etc.), with no public pricing and no guaran…

I built my own web search index on bare metal, index now up to 34m docs: https://greppr.org/

People rely too much on other people's infra and services, which can be decommissioned anytime. The Google Graveyard is real.

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#18
post #8

Meanwhile in Europe: Qwant and Ecosia team up to build their own search index: https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp/

It's a noble effort, but they're so late to the game that it's hard to see them making a significant dent. I hope I'm wrong.

They were:

> aiming to serve 30% of French search queries [by end of 2025]

https://blog.ecosia.org/launching-our-european-search-index/

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