Google Search API Alternative

Google custom search JSON API is a RESTFUL API that lets you develop applications to get and show search results (web search, images) from Google custom search programmatically. With this API, you can use RESTful requests to get either web search or image search results in JSON format. The documentation of the topic is pretty obscure and people often search for a Google Search API Alternative. 

You can read more about the custom search API in this article.

Limitations of Google custom search API-

1. You can only retrieve a maximum of 10 search results at a time.
2. Query limit of 100 per day.

Using ExpertRec as a Google Search API Alternative

Using an API does give you fine control, but does make it more difficult to set up the search engine. ExpertRec has already done this part and gives you an easy to use interface where you can configure the search to your liking without writing any code. If you still wish to follow the API method, then you can refer to the API docs.

Here we will visit the steps required to add the ExpertRec Custom search engine to your website. This is one of the easiest setup processes of all the available options out there and is highly recommended.

1. Navigate to https://cse.expertrec.com/newuser?platform=cse and signup with your Google ID.
2. Enter your website’s URL when prompted. You can select a server location near you and add the URL of your sitemap if you wish to. These will be auto-detected otherwise.
3. You can play around with the settings and customize the UI as the crawl runs. Once it is complete, you can check out a fully functional demo before taking the search to your website.
4. You can take the search to your website with little to no effort. All you need to do is to paste the code snippet available on the dashboard on your website.

ExpertRec comes with more customization options that you can explore. You can read this article to find a more detailed guide on the installation and configuration. If you want a web search API, that is also possible. You can refer to this article to get the details.

Add Custom Search to your Website