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...

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

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.

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?

RIP, another one to the Google Graveyard.

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.

Just dissolve them in acid.

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

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.