Google is ending full-web search for niche search engines

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 guarantee they’ll even reply.

This seems like it effectively ends the era of indie / niche search engines being able to build on Google’s index. Anything that looks like general web search is getting pushed behind enterprise gates.

I haven’t seen much discussion about this yet, but for anyone who built a small search product on Programmable Search, this feels like a pretty big shift.

Curious if others here are affected or already planning alternatives.

UPDATE: I logged into Programmable Search and the message is even more explicit: Full web search via the "Search the entire web" feature will be discontinued within the next year. Please update your search engine to specify specific sites to search. With this link: https://support.google.com/programmable-search/answer/123971...

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

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.

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

The 'Google Graveyard is real' sentiment captures something important: every dependency on a large platform is a loan that can be called in. The 34-million-document indie index project someone mentioned is the right response - own your core infrastructure. Easier said than done for whole-web search, but the same principle applies everywhere.

Are competing search indexes (Bing, Ecosia/Qwant, etc) objectively worse in significant ways, or is Google just so entrenched that people don't want to "risk it" with another provider (and/or preferences and/or inertia).

I suppose I'm asking whether this is actually a _good thing_ in that it will stimulate competition in the space, or if it's just a case that Google's index is now too good for anyone to reasonably catch up at this point.

Google has consistently ruined its search engine in the last (almost) 10 years. You can find numerous articles about this, as well as videos on youtube (which is also controlled by google).

Not long ago they ruined ublock origin (for chrome; ublock origin lite is nowhere near as good and effective, from my own experience here).

Now Google is also committing towards more evil and trying to ruin things for more - people, competitors, you name it. We can not allow Google to continue on its wiched path here. It'll just further erode the quality. There is a reason why "killed by google" is more than a mere meme - a graveyard of things killed by google.

We need alternatives, viable ones, for ALL Google services. Let's all work to make this world better - a place without Google.

I had misread the title as "Google is ending (full-web search) for [aka in favour of] (niche search engines)"

The correct parsing is: "Google is ending (full-web search for niche search engines)"

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

Are search engines like Kagi completely screwed by this or is there a way for them to keep operating?

Never build a product with core feature depending on a third-party, you will eventually get fucked up for sure. always have a 70:30 rule for revenue where 70% is core independent features.

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

Antitrust do not work against large companies.

Just dissolve them in acid.

This underscores the core value of cross-platform unified memory.

What examples are there of people using this?

Is this perhaps to prevent ChatGPT, Claude and Grok to use Google Search? It would make sense for Google to keep that ability for Gemini.