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...
This matters much more than people (and evidently those within Google) realize
Planning ahead doesn’t mean you never suffer from unexpected events, including depreciations. And long timelines help you as much as anyone else.
Dear Programmable Search Engine user,
Thank you for contacting us via the Web Search Products Interest Form. We have received your feedback and are actively reviewing the specific use cases you shared.
We are writing to share important details regarding the transition plan and the available solutions for your search needs.
1. For Unrestricted Web Search: Future Web Search Service
For partners requiring unrestricted "Search the entire web" capabilities, we are developing a new enterprise-grade Web Search Service. As you evaluate your future needs, please be aware of the commercial terms planned for this new service:
Pricing: USD $15 CPM (Cost Per Mille / 1,000 requests).
Minimum Commitment: A minimum monthly fee of USD $30,000 will apply.
We’ll release more information on this service later in 2026. Existing 'Search the entire web' engines remain functional until January 1, 2027.
2. For AI & Advanced Search: Google Vertex AI
We strongly encourage you to explore Google Vertex AI as another option for partners who need enterprise search and AI capabilities across 50 or fewer domains. Vertex AI offers powerful capabilities for:
Grounded Generation: Connecting your AI agents to your own data and/or to Google Search to provide accurate, up-to-date responses.
Custom Data Search: Building enterprise-grade search engines over your own data and specific websites.
This solution is available now and is designed to scale with your specific application needs.
Clarification on Current Service Status:
While you evaluate which path fits your business needs, please remember the timeline for your current implementations:
Existing Projects: If you have an existing Programmable Search Engine configured to "Search the entire web," your service will continue to function until January 1, 2027. You have the full year to plan your migration.
New Projects: As of January 20, 2026, new engines created in the Programmable Search Engine admin console are restricted to "Site Search Only" (specific domains only).
Later in 2026 we’ll provide you with more updates regarding the new Web Search Service and the means to express your desire to use it to power your web search experiences.
Sincerely,
Programmable Search Engine Team
People rely too much on other people's infra and services, which can be decommissioned anytime. The Google Graveyard is real.
I just searched for “stackoverflow” and the first result was this: https://www.perl.com/tags/stackoverflow/
The actual Stackoverflow site was ranked way down, below some weird twitter accounts.
Even with PageRank result prioritisation is highly subject to gaming. Raw keyword search is far more so (keyword stuffing and other shenanigans), moreso as any given search engine begins to become popular and catch the attention of publishers.
Google now applies other additional ordering factors as well. And of course has come to dominate SERP results with paid, advertised, listings, which are all but impossible to discern from "organic" search results.
(I've not used Google Web Search as my primary tool for well over a decade, and probably only run a few searches per month. DDG is my primary, though I'll look at a few others including Kagi and Marginalia, though those rarely.)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank>
"The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine" (1998) <http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf> (PDF)
Early (1990s) search engines: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine#1990s:_Birth_of_...>.
Fair play to them though, it enabled them to build a massive business.
I publish exports of the ones Marginalia is aware of[1] if you want to play with integrating them.
[1] https://downloads.marginalia.nu/exports/ grab 'atags-25-04-20.parquet'
"Affiliation" is a tricky term itself. Content farms were popular in the aughts (though they seem to have largely subsided), firms such as Claria and Gator. There are chumboxes (Outbrain, Taboola), and of course affiliate links (e.g., to Amazon or other shopping sites). SEO manipulation is its own whole universe.
(I'm sure you know far more about this than I do, I'm mostly talking at other readers, and maybe hoping to glean some more wisdom from you ;-)
I've also seen some benefit fingerpinting the network traffic the websites make using a headless browser, to identify which ad networks they load. Very few spam sites have no ads, since there wouldn't be any economy in that.
e.g. https://marginalia-search.com/site/www.salon.com?view=traffi...
The full data set of DOM samples + recorded network traffic are in an enormous sqlite file (400GB+), and I haven't yet worked out any way of distributing the data yet. Though it's in the back of my mind as something I'd like to solve.
I'd also suspect that there are networks / links which are more likely signs of low-value content than others. Off the top of my head, crypto, MLM, known scam/fraud sites, and perhaps share links to certain social networks might be negative indicators.
Have a lil' data explorer for this: https://explore2.marginalia.nu/
Quite a lot of dead links in the dataset, but it's still useful.
It’s also why it is so hard to compete with Google. You guys are talking about techniques for analyzing the corpus of the search index. Google does that and has a direct view into how millions of people interact with it.
The Chrome iOS app still knows every url visited, duration, scroll depth, etc.
There is a native Chrome app on iOS. It gets all the same url visit data as Chrome on other platforms.
Apple blocks 3rd party renderers and JS engines on iOS to protect its App Store from competition that might deliver software and content through other channels that they don't take a cut of.
It’s cool though, and really fast
You are absolutely right, it is the hardest part!
I feel like Google-style "search" has made people really dumb and unable to help themselves.
Indexing is a nice compact CS problem; not completely simple for huge datasets like the entire internet, but well-formed. Ranking is the thing that makes a search engine valuable. Especially when faced with people trying to game it with SEO.
amazing, for real.
everything i’ve read and heard about the good internet is that it was good because sooooo many of the people did stuff for exactly that, fun.
i’ve spent some time reading through some of the old email lists from earlier internet folks, they predicted exactly what weve turned this into. reading the resistance against early adoption of cookies is incredible to see how prescient some of those people were. truly incredible.
keep having fun with it, i think it’s our only way out of whatever this thing is we have now.
Can you talk a bit about your stack? The about page mentions grep but I'd assume it's a bit more complex than having a large volume and running grep over it ;)
Is it some sort of custom database or did you keep it simple? Do you also run a crawler?
There's a reason Google became so popular as quickly as it did. It's even harder to compete in this space nowadays, as the volume of junk and SEO spam is many orders of magnitude worse as a percentage of the corpus than it was back then.
It's driven by my own personal nostalgia for the early Internet, and to find interesting hidden corners of the Internet that are becoming increasingly hard to find on Google after you wade through all of the sponsored results and spam in the first few pages...
[0] https://www.site.uottawa.ca/~stan/csi5389/readings/google.pd...
It is intended, that the page currently shows a link to the wordpress login?
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
Demo for most important ones https://rumca-js.github.io/search
> I am trying to say is many servers ignore "Accept-Language"
I wouldn't have expected that to be a hard rule, more like if there are multiple pages to return to have a factor, which one the user most likely wants.
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.
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.
Others have to replace Google. We need access to public information. States can not allow corporations to hold us here hostage.
https://dn710204.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...
[0]> Google: Google does not offer a public search API. The only available path is an ad-syndication bundle with no changes to result presentation - the model Startpage uses. Ad syndication is a non-starter for Kagi’s ad-free subscription model.[^1]
[0]> The current interim approach (current as of Jan 21, 2026)
[0]> Because direct licensing isn’t available to us on compatible terms, we - like many others - use third-party API providers for SERP-style results (SERP meaning search engine results page). These providers serve major enterprises (according to their websites) including Nvidia, Adobe, Samsung, Stanford, DeepMind, Uber, and the United Nations.
I’m an avid Kagi user, and it seems like Kagi and some other notable interested parties have _already_ been unable to do get what they want/need with Google’s index.
[0]> The fact that we - and companies like Stanford, Nvidia, Adobe, and the United Nations - have had to rely on third-party vendors is a symptom of the closed ecosystem, not a preference.
Hopefully someone here can clarify for me, or enumerate some of these “third-party vendors” who seem like they will/might/could be directly affected by this.
[0] antibabelic > relevant https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search [1] https://blog.kagi.com/dawn-new-era-search > [^1]: A note on Google’s existing APIs: Google offers PSE, designed for adding search boxes to websites. It can return web results, but with reduced scope and terms tailored for that narrow use case. More recently, Google offers Grounding with Google Search through Vertex AI, intended for grounding LLM responses. Neither is general-purpose index access. Programmable Search Engine is not designed for building competitive search. Grounding with Google Search is priced at $35 per 1,000 requests - economically unviable for search at scale, and structured as an AI add-on rather than standalone index syndication. These are not the FRAND terms the market needs
That must be the reason why they limit the searches you can do in the starter plan. Every SerpApi call costs money.
And I can't prove correlation but they refused to index one of my domains and I think it _might_ be because we had some content on there about how to use SerpAPI
https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search
Which saw some discussion on HN.
~450 score, ~247 comments and still on /best ("Most-upvoted stories of the last 48 hours"):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708678 - "Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi"
> Google does not offer a public search API. The only available path is an ad-syndication bundle with no changes to result presentation - the model Startpage uses. Ad syndication is a non-starter for Kagi’s ad-free subscription model.
But since they're not using/paying for a supported API but just taking what they want, they indeed are unlikely to be impacted by this API turndown.
That would be a monopoly if there was only 1 river in the whole world.
Kagi did make comments for years implying that they had a deal with Google for search results, but their latest blog post makes it clear that is not true and was never true.
Google is a monopoly across several broad categories. They're also a taxation enterprise.
Google Search took over as the URL bar for 91% of all web users across all devices.
Since this intercepts trademarks and brand names, Google gets to tax all businesses unfairly.
Tell your legislators in the US and the EU that Google shouldn't be able to sell ads against registered trademarks (+/- some edit distance). They re-engineered the web to be a taxation system for all businesses across all categories.
Searching for Claude -> Ads in first place
Searching for ChatGPT -> Ads in first place
Searching for iPhone -> Ads in first place
This is inexcusable.
Only searches for "ChatGPT versus", "iPhone reviews", or "Nintendo game comparison" should allow ads. And one could argue that the "URL Bar" shouldn't auto suggest these either when a trademark is in the URL bar.
If Google won't play fair, we have to kill 50% of their search revenue for being egregiously evil.
If you own a trademark, Google shouldn't be able to sell ads against you.
--
Google's really bad. Ideally we'd get an antitrust breakup. They're worse than Ma Bell. I wouldn't even split Google into multiple companies by division - I'd force them to be multiple copies of the same exact entity that then have to compete with each other:
Bell Systems -> {BellSouth, Bell Atlantic, Southwestern Bell, ...}
Google -> {GoogleA, GoogleB, GoogleC, ...}
They'd each have cloud, search, browser, and YouTube. But new brand names for new parent companies. That would create all-out war and lead to incredible consumer wins.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_facilities_doctrine
This is frustrating even from a consumer perspective. Before I ran adblock everywhere, I couldn't stand that typing in a specific company I was looking for would just serve ads from any number of related brands that I wasn't looking for that were competitors.
The problem is scrapers (mostly AI scrapers from what we can tell). They will pound a site into the ground and not care and they are becoming increasingly good at hiding their tracks. The only reasonable way to deal with them is to rate-limit every IP by default and then lifting some of those restrictions on known, well behaving bots. Now we will lift those restrictions if asked, and frequently look at statistics to lift the restrictions from search engines we might have missed, but it's an up hill battle if you're new and unknown.
This just lets a monopoly replace the website instead of distributing power and fostering open source. The same monopoly that was already bleeding off the web's utility and taxing it.
> Google must provide Web Search Index data (URLs, crawl metadata, spam scores) at marginal cost.
Maybe they're shutting down the good integration and then Kagi, Ecosia and others can buy index data in an inconvenient way going forward?
Kagi makes deals with many search engines so they can have raw search results in exchange for money.
Google says: no, you can't have raw search results because only whales can get those. Only thing we can offer you is search results riddled with ads and we won't allow you to reorder or filter them.
Kagi thinks Google's offer is unacceptable, so Kagi goes to a third party SERP API, which scrapes Google at scale and sells the raw search results to Kagi and others.
August 2024: Court says Google is breaking the law by selling raw search results only to whales.
December 2025: Court orders that for the next six years, 1. Google must no longer exclude non-whales from buying raw search results, 2. Google must offer the raw search results for a reasonable price, and 3. Google can no longer force partners to bundle the results with ads.
December 2025: Google sues the third-party scraping companies.
January 2026: Google says "hey, the old search offering is going to go away, there's going to be a new API by 2027, stay tuned."
It is perhaps a clever legal workaround. They must sell access to their index, but the verdict didn't state how much of it you can buy access to at any one time. So they put a limit of 50 domains, because that accommodates everyone who's not a search engine, but effectively blocks Kagi and Ecosia, while not exactly refusing to sell to them.
I was referring to the following statement about full web search where they don’t mention a 50-domains limit:
> if your use case necessitates full web search, contact us to express your interest in and get more information about our full web search solution. Your transition to an alternative solution needs to be completed by January 1, 2027.
Granted, that is scoped to 50 domains. But we don't know if the enterprise package, which allows full web search, isn't roughly market rate.
They were:
> aiming to serve 30% of French search queries [by end of 2025]
https://blog.ecosia.org/launching-our-european-search-index/
> The French index is at an advanced stage of completion, we have started creating the German language index, and the English one should start shortly. All progress is quickly integrated into the Qwant STAAN API.
But of course they managed to cut themselves a nice salary with EU funds, paid in part by me and you, so that's all that matters.
If they deem it necessary to rein in Google, they will rein in Google. There's no lack of tools for this, ranging from obliging phones sold in French territory to offer the French search engine as the default, to forcing every Google search result to promote the local search engine prominently, to campaigns about how it's important for national security not to rely on an adversary/enemy country's services, to everything in between and beyond.
PageRank wouldn't exist without webrings, directories, and forums you could only search individually, and we thrived on that Internet.
Welcome back, ye olde Internet.
Internet isn't a global village, it's a global ghetto, and it's becoming increasingly true that the only way not to lose is not to play.
For anyone affected: consider this a forcing function to either: 1. Build your own lightweight search infrastructure (tools like Meilisearch, Typesense make this more accessible now) 2. Use adversarial interop via services like SerpAPI (though Google is already taking legal action there) 3. Pivot to specialized vertical search where you control the data sources
The real lesson here is the importance of owning your core value proposition. If your product's moat depends entirely on a third-party API that can be yanked away with 12 months notice, you don't really have a sustainable business.
Google is essentially saying: indie search is dead, pay enterprise prices or leave. This will probably accelerate the trend toward specialized, domain-specific search engines that don't rely on Google's index at all.
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.
Imagine a decentralized network where volunteers run crawler nodes that each fetch and extract a tiny slice of the web. Those partial results get merged into open, versioned indexes that can be distributed via P2P (or mirrored anywhere). Then anyone can build ranking, vertical search, or specialized tools on top of that shared index layer.
I get that reproducing Google’s “Coca-Cola formula” (ranking, spam fighting, infra, freshness, etc.) is probably unrealistic. But I’d happily use the coconut-water version: an open baseline index that’s good enough, extensible, and not owned by a single gatekeeper.
I know we have common crawl, but small processing nodes can be more efficient and fresh
YaCy, a distributed Web Search Engine, based on a peer-to-peer network https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39612950
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.
If you want programmatic access to search results there aren't really many options left.
Bing charge per query for the average user. Ecosia and Qwant use Bing to power their results, probably under some type of license, which results in them paying much less per query than a normal user.
But for searching in more niche languages google is usually the only decent option and I have little hope that others will ever reach the scale where they could compete.
I keep seeing posts about how ~"the volume of AI scrapers is making hosting untenable."
There must a ton of new full-web datasets out there, right?
What are the major hurdles that prevent the owners of these datasets from providing them to third parties via API? Is it the quality of SERP, or staleness? Otherwise, this seems like a potentially lucrative pivot/side hustle?
Sadly, no. There's CommonCrawl (https://commoncrawl.org/) which still, sadly, far removed from "full-web dataset."
So everyone runs their own search instead, hammering the sites, going into gray areas (you either ignore robots.txt or your results suck), etc. It's a tragedy of the commons that keeps Google entrenched: https://senkorasic.com/articles/ai-scraper-tragedy-commons
Aside from that potential, it's also not true.
A Pentium Pro or PIII SSE with circa 1998-99 Apache happily delivers a billion hits a month w/o breaking a sweat unless you think generating pages for every visit is better than generating pages when they change.
Or, is that what orgs like Perplexity are doing, but with an LLM API? Meaning that they have their own indexes, but the original q= SERP API concept is a dead end in the market?
Tone: I am asking genuine questions here, not trying to be snarky.
Also, of course, the amount of spam-for-SEO (pre-slop slop?) as a proportion of what's out there has also grown over time.
IOW: Google has "gotten worse" because the web has gotten worse. Garbage in, garbage out.
> Or locked up in an app...
I believe you may have at least partially meant Discord, for which I personally have significant hate. Not really for the owners/devs, but why in the heck would any product owner want to hide the knowledge of how to user their app on a closed platform? No search engine can find it, no LLM can learn from it(?). Lost knowledge. I hate it so much. Yes, user engagement, but knowledge vs. engagement is the battle of our era, and knowledge keeps losing.
r/anything is so much better than a Discord server, especially in the age of "Software 3.0"
RIP, another one to the Google Graveyard.
Hard part is doing it at any sort of scale and producing useful results. It's easy to build something that indexes a few million documents. Pushing into billions is a bigger challenge, as you start needing a lot of increasingly intricate bespoke solutions.
Devlog here:
https://www.marginalia.nu/tags/search-engine/
And search engine itself:
https://marginalia-search.com/
(... though it operates a bit sub-optimally now as I'm using a ton of CPU cores to migrate the index to use postings lists compression, will take about 4-5 days I think).
AMD EPYC 7543 x2 for 64 cores/128 threads
512 GB RAM
~ 90 TB of PM9A3 SSDs across 12 physical devices
Storage is not very full though. I'm probably using about a third of it at this point.
I found it didn’t really work as a real search engine but it was interesting.
Although, it needs some more work and peers to be usable as a general-purpose search engine.
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.
We're in the second era. The era of the MBAs are shutting down the last remnants of openness the company ever had.
Just dissolve them in acid.
If you actually enforce them.
Unfortunately, during the Reagan administration, political sentiment toward monopolies shifted and since then antitrust law has been a paper tiger at best.
> SerpApi deceptively takes content that Google licenses from others (like images that appear in Knowledge Panels, real-time data in Search features and much more), and then resells it for a fee. In doing so, it willfully disregards the rights and directives of websites and providers whose content appears in Search.
it sounds like they are somehow suing on behalf of whoever they are licensing content from, but does that even give Google standing?
I guess I'm asking if they actually are hoping to win or just going for a "the process is the punishment"+"we have more money and lawyers than you" approach.
The correct parsing is: "Google is ending (full-web search for niche search engines)"
Given that the title supplied is effectively editorialised, and the original article's title is effectively content-free ("Updates to our Web Search Products & Programmable Search Engine Capabilities"), my rewording would be at least as fair.
HN's policy is to try to use text from the article itself where the article title is clickbait, sensational, vague, etc., however. I suspect Google's blog authors are aware of this, and they've carefully avoided any readily-extracted clear statements, though I'll take a stab...
Here's the most direct 'graph from TFA:
Custom Search JSON API: Vertex AI Search is a favorable alternative for up to 50 domains. Alternatively, if your use case necessitates full web search, contact us to express your interest in and get more information about our full web search solution. Your transition to an alternative solution needs to be completed by January 1, 2027.
We can get a clearer, 80-character head that's somewhat faithful to that with:
"Google Search API alternative Vertex AI Search limited to 50 domains" (70 chars).
That's still pretty loosely adherent, though it (mostly) uses words from the original article. I'm suggesting it to mods via email at hn@ycominator.com; others may wish to suggest their own formulations.
One thing touched upon in comments here: I never understood how it was proper for 3rd parties to scrape Google search results and reuse/resell them.
Really off topic, sorry, but I am surprised that more companies don’t build local search indices for just the few hundred web domains that are important to their businesses. I have tried this in combination with local (small and fast) LLMs and I think this is unappreciated tech: fast, cheap, and local.
What they are ending is their support for websites to search across the entire web. The websites that search across the entire web are usually niche search engine websites.