I created a Google Search API, but need help selling it.
I prototyped my Google Search API (https://rapidapi.com/apigeek/api/google-search3) service using RapidAPI and they take care of the front end, user management, and subscription processing. I have two subscription tiers (Basic and Pro) right now. The Basic allows 50 requests/day while the Pro allows unlimited requests/day. I've been doing blogs and answering questions related to scraping Google and so far I have 40 Basic users and 1 person actually subscribed to the Pro.
How can I convert more users? Is the pricing plan bad? Do I need to build my own API platform instead of relying on RapidAPI, but this will take a lot of effort.
Any guidance would be appreciated.
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I would advise you to be careful because scraping is probably a violation of the ToS you agreed to the first time you accessed Google search. So they can block and/or sue you for losses incurred, which might be as high as the $5 per 1000 requests that they regularly charge for programmatic access.
People looking for Google Search APIs need high volume. I know it, we try building it at Phantombuster and got rate limited pretty fast. At the moment we're switching to Bing Search API. Results are not Google's for sure but we're using Bing's official API so we can do virtually unlimited searches.
That is the problem I was trying to solve. I needed to perform large volume of searches on Google, but kept getting blacklisted. This API can help people facing the same problem. How many searches do you guys perform daily?
I solve it with my API: https://rapidapi.com/marcelinhov2/api/google-search1
You can use together with https://github.com/marcelinhov2/rapidapi-ignition for High Volume good results.
Hmmm "Google Search API you created" sounds a little bit strange to me... who would buy it if Google already has API that everyone can use almost for free?
@Zencentric people use rapidApi in order to integrate with many different APIs without creating custom integrations with each one separately. They take care of authentication, key management, etc, and you get a unified API to talk to all the different APIs. For someone who's integrating with many different APIs this worth a lot of time=money.
Well, okay, thanks.
Note: The Google Web Search API has been officially deprecated as of November 1, 2010.
https://developers.google.com/custom-search ?
That is for searching content for your website. My API allows you to perform regular Google searches.
Google doesn't have a real-time search API!
What do you mean by "real-time" in the context of search API?
Google has an API for the search but it is limited to 10k queries per day (and cost $50x30 = $1500/mo by the way).
If you want more volume you can either use a third party API, lots of these API aren't real time, they cache query results for a certain period of time.
Or you can use the Google restricted site API: https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/site_restricted_api (but it still cost $5/1000 queries).
So yes I think a lot of people are buying those third-party APIs to perform google queries programmatically.
If Google restricts using or makes it so expensive, how a third-party API can overcome it?
There are work arounds. What I am doing is web scraping rather than using a API.
Right,
got it. What about using https://developers.google.com/custom-search?
This is for searching your website.
Ah, okay, so there is only one way left - web scraping. I wonder if they can track how it's used.
Yes Google does detect it. After so certain amount of request Google will throw captchas at you. My API will bypass that.