News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Web search on the Anthropic API by jwr on Wednesday May 07, 2025 @09:24PM (#43922192)
> Google's pricing for a general search API

As I discovered recently, and much to my surprise, Google does not offer a "general search API", at least not officially.

There is a "custom search" API that sounds like web search, but isn't: it offers a subset of the index, which is not immediately apparent. Confusing and misleading labeling there.

Bing offers something a bit better, but I recently ended up trying the Kagi API, and it is the best thing I found so far. Expensive ($25/1000), but works well.

Re:Web search on the Anthropic API by jsnell on Wednesday May 07, 2025 @11:35PM (#43922848)
There are multiple search engines known to be based on Google's API (Startpage, Leta, Kagi), so that product definitely exists. But it exciting that's all we know. They indeed do not publish anything about it. We don't know the price, the terms, or even the name.
Re:Web search on the Anthropic API by formercoder on Wednesday May 07, 2025 @09:37PM (#43922286)
I work at Google but not on this. We do offer Gemini with Google Search grounding which is similar to a search API.
Re:Web search on the Anthropic API by QuadmasterXLII on Wednesday May 07, 2025 @10:56PM (#43922662)
??????
Re:Web search on the Anthropic API by teeklp on Thursday May 08, 2025 @09:52AM (#43926110)
How much do you pay people to use this?
Re:Web search on the Anthropic API by camkego on Thursday May 08, 2025 @03:23AM (#43923918)
Do you have any references to the point that the Google Custom Search API is for a subset of the regular Google search index?
Re:Web search on the Anthropic API by ricw on Thursday May 08, 2025 @08:32AM (#43925500)
No reference here but found this out the hard way too. Google search Ali is Utterly useless in fact and entirely different search results vs using the web. Bing is better. Haven’t tried ksgi yet
Re:Web search on the Anthropic API by jwr on Friday May 09, 2025 @01:43AM (#43934095)
"References"? :-) This is a corporation we're talking about, and Google at that. Layers upon layers of obscurity, "strategic decisions" and discontinued products.

Try it and you'll see — there is no official Search API and the Custom Search API is quite poor and not usable in most scenarios.