alt Hacker NewsGoogle 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...
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> “search the entire web”
TIL they allowed that before. It sounds a bit crazy. Like Google is inviting people to repackage google search itself and sell it / serve with their own ads.
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.
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.
What are some of the niche search engines build on Google's index affected by this?