Google is discontinuing its free web search index for developers
Comments
SyneRyder
janalsncm
This was announced in January.
https://programmablesearchengine.googleblog.com/2026/01/upda...
tech234a
The article suggests Common Crawl as a replacement which probably doesn’t make sense on its own due to low update frequency (monthly) and somewhat limited crawl scope.
(Looks like the sentence following the suggestion addresses this somewhat.)
elektor
Is this good for Kagi?
hmokiguess
Does Kagi have a free developer api?
SyneRyder
Not free, 2.5c per search:
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/search.html
Their API doesn't provide the mixed Kagi metasearch results though. Only results from their smallweb Teclis index, Curlie, and I think Marginalia results are included. Probably also other sources I'm not aware of.
Marginalia has a free-ish API for non-commercial purposes if you go direct:
iberator
Good. Duck google and use other indexing.
ps. Modern AI is in reality talking web search engine imo.
janalsncm
An LLM does not continuously index the Internet and is therefore stale the second it starts training. You need to use something like RAG. And the R in RAG needs an index.
hmokiguess
What other index is there that is both free, reliable, and accurate at web scale?
iberator
yuck duck go
mamman777
I just see another small competitor becoming big by taking over
Some alternative web search APIs:
Marginalia: free-ish for non-commercial use https://about.marginalia-search.com/article/api/
Brave: free for first 1000/mth, 0.5c per search https://brave.com/search/api/
Mojeek: £0.001 - £0.003 (0.1p - 0.3p) per search https://www.mojeek.com/services/search/web-search-api/
Kagi: 2.5c per search https://help.kagi.com/kagi/api/search.html