As so many others, my company needed an alternative for its search engine. We were using Google Site Search (GSS) for years and were happy with it. Google Site Search was about to discontinue its ad-free service and downgrade all accounts to Custom Search Engine accounts which are ad based. Time was running out and we had several concerns:
- Google was giving the best search results compared to other alternatives
- Having Google as your site’s search engine has the benefit of learning how the global Google (Google.com) crawls and indexes your site
- We have many search engines defined for our website. One for English only results, one for Japanese, one for only this section, one for another etc. Other search engines required us to set up all from scratch and even opening more than one account in order to achieve all this
- GSS was cheap. All other solutions are more expensive
- Some solutions required using your own crawler, or a difficult set up procedure
And then, in one of my correspondences with GSS support I discovered that Google has a Custom Search JSON/ATOM API that works with my existing search engine definitions and offers a paid account with no ads!
So my alternative to using Google Site Search (GSS) was to use… Google.
The API has no support and requires some technical skills, but it works. No ads, cheap and uses the same definitions used for GSS. For more information go to Google’s Custom Search JSON/Atom API documentation.
If you’re not technical or need help setting this up, please contact me here: