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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

#41

Post by 01jonny01 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #27
01jonny01 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Also LLM tools. Programmable Search Engine API was a way to give third-party LLM frontends the ability to give LLMs a web search tool. Notably, this was a common practice long before any of the major LLM providers added search capabilities to their frontents.

Exactly, Google want every one depended on Gemini.

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

#44

Post by baubino »

Gigachad wrote: post #26
tweetle_beetle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I feel like soon there won’t even be a point having a search engine since almost the entire internet will be useless AI slop.

The old internet is still there. It hasn‘t gone away; it‘s just undiscoverable with ad-based search. The more slop there is, the more necessary it is to have good search engines.

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

#45

Post by solarkraft »

This will significantly impact (quite possibly kill) Startpage and Ecosia, who are effectively white-label Google, right?

What alternatives are there besides Bing? Is it really so hard that it’s not considered worth doing? Some of the AI companies (Perplexity, Anthropic) seem to have managed to get their own indexing up and running.

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

#46

Post by rickette »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #35
bovermyer wrote: post #19

I'm curious about what it would take to build my own "toy" search engine with its own index. Anyone ever tried this?

Yeah that's where I started out in 2021. Been at it for almost 5 years now, last three of which full time. I'm indexing about 1.1 billion documents now off a single server. Hard part is doing it at any sort of scale and producing useful results. It's easy to build something that indexes a few million documents. Pushing into billions is a bigger challenge, as you start needing a lot of increasingly intricate bespoke s…

Curious on what (how much) hardware your running this.

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

#48

Post by chromehearts »

01jonny01 wrote: post #12
chromehearts wrote: post #7

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.

Ahh; so that's the difference. Thanks!

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

#49

Post by salawat »

01jonny01 wrote: post #2

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…

It's been clear for the last decade that we have to wean ourselves off of centralized search indexes if only to innoculate the Net against censorship/politically motivated black holing.

I can only weep at this point, as the heroes that were the Silent and Greatest generations (in the U.S.), who fought hard to pass on as much institutional knowledge as possible through hardcore organization and distribution via public and University library, have had that legacy shit on by these ad obsessed cretins. The entirety of human published understanding; and we make it nigh impossible for all but the most determined to actually avail themselves of it.

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

#50

Post by orf »

saltysalt wrote: post #31
orf wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Number of docs isn’t the limiting factor. I just searched for “stackoverflow” and the first result was this: https://www.perl.com/tags/stackoverflow/ The actual Stackoverflow site was ranked way down, below some weird twitter accounts.

I don't weight home pages in any way yet to bump them up, it's just raw search on keyword relevance.

Sure, but the point is results are not relevant at all?

It’s cool though, and really fast

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