Custom Search JSON API

The Custom Search JSON API lets you develop websites and applications to retrieve and display search results from Programmable Search Engine programmatically. With this API, you can use RESTful requests to get either web search or image search results in JSON format.

Data format

Custom Search JSON API can return results in JSON data format.

The Custom Search JSON API uses the OpenSearch 1.1 Specification.

Prerequisites

Search engine ID

Before using the Custom Search JSON API you will first need to create and configure your Programmable Search Engine. If you have not already created a Programmable Search Engine, you can start by visiting the Programmable Search Engine control panel.

Follow the tutorial to learn more about different configuration options.

After you have created a Programmable Search Engine, visit the help center to learn how to locate your Search engine ID.

API key

Custom Search JSON API requires the use of an API key. Get a Key

Pricing

Custom Search JSON API provides 100 search queries per day for free. If you need more, you may sign up for billing in the API Console. Additional requests cost $5 per 1000 queries, up to 10k queries per day.

Monitoring

Basic monitoring for the Custom Search JSON API is available through Cloud Platform Console's API Dashboard. For more advanced monitoring Google Cloud's Operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) is available.

With Google Cloud Operations you can create custom dashboards, set up alerts, and access metrics data programmatically. To access Custom Search JSON API usage data in Google Cloud Operations, select "Resource type: Consumed API" and filter on "service = 'customsearch.googleapis.com'" in the Query Builder.

See Monitoring Your API Usage for a discussion of the different monitoring and alerting capabilities provided by the API Dashboard and the Google Cloud Operations suite.