Top 10 Best Search APIs: Google Search API, Twitter Search, Bing Search

Search APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) allow you to integrate search capabilities into your application so that users can retrieve and display the information most relevant to them. With the APIs, you can build fulfilling search and discovery experiences for your users across different platforms.

To assist you in finding the best search technology for accelerating your users’ experiences, we reviewed several search APIs based on the following three main criteria:

• API features: We assessed the outstanding features of the search APIs.
• Pricing: We looked at the cost of integrating each of the APIs into applications.
• Ease of use: We scrutinized the ease of using the APIs to assist users get the information they are looking for.

Eventually, we came up with the following list of the top 10 best search APIs.

• Google Search API
• Twitter Search API
• Bing Search API
• Search API by 3taps
• WolframAlpha API
• Web Search API
• Algolia API
• News Search API
• Domainr API
• GeoRanker API

Top 10 Best Search APIs

TL;DR: Here’s a table that summarizes our main findings.

1. Google Search API

The Google Custom Search API lets you build out websites and applications to retrieve search results from the Programmable Engine either programmatically. The JSON output is perfect for developers who want more control of their data than what’s available on a website, which can be challenging to manage in many cases.

The Google Custom Search (CS) API allows programmers of various skill levels access to search data. The API gives complete autonomy over all aspects of managing information retrieval via CS-enabled programs built with it without extensive knowledge about its inner workings like HTML tags or programming language skillset required.

API features: The JSON API enables you to add a search box to your application so that users can find the information they want quickly and easily. The API lets you send RESTful requests and return both web search and image search results delivered in the JSON data format. You can fine-tune the ranking of the search results, include your own advertisements, earn money by connecting the engine to your Google AdSense account, and carry out other customization tasks.

Pricing: The Google Search API  allows you to make 100 search queries every day for free. If you want more requests, you’ll pay $5 per 1,000 queries, but limited to 10,000 queries per day. Google also offers another pricing plan that is suitable for more extensive usage and without the daily query limit.

Ease of use: Google provides comprehensive documentation on how to make the most of the API. There is also an active community of developers who will assist you to overcame any integration challenges.

2. Twitter Search API

The Twitter Search Tweets API allows you to incorporate the ability to search for Twitter data within your application.

API features: Twitter provides three tiers of search APIs: the Standard tier that searches the recent Tweets posted within the previous 7 days, the Premium tier that searches either the previous 30 days of Tweets or as early as 2006, and the Enterprise tier that also searchers the previous 30 days of Tweets or as early as 2006, but with enhanced functionalities. It returns data in JSON format.

Pricing: The Standard API tier is offered for free. The Premium tier is either free or paid. The Enterprise tier is paid and provides you with managed access to Twitter’s data. The pricing for the 30-day endpoint begins from $149 per month for 500 API requests whereas the full-archive endpoint begins from $99 per month for 100 API requests.

Ease of use: Twitter is known for offering detailed documentation and SDKs on how to integrate its APIs, and the search API is no exception.

3. Bing Search API

The Bing Web Search API is a Microsoft-owned API that lets you bring Bing’s search capabilities into your workspace.

API features: The RESTful API service allows you to comb billions of web resources and get instant results with no ads. The search results are provided as JSON and can be customized to include web pages, videos, images, translations, news, and many more. Furthermore, the Bing Search API comes with features for suggesting real-time search terms, filtering results according to the type of content, and localizing the search results.

Pricing: You can use the API for free, but you’ll be limited to 3,000 transactions per month. For more extensive usage requirements, you can go for any of its paid plans, which starts from $7 per 1,000 transactions.

Ease of use: Microsoft offers step-by-step tutorials that are full of code samples, enabling you to easily build applications using the API.

4. Search API by 3taps

The Search API allows you to perform searches against a database and retrieve postings. It only returns publicly available information regarding the supply, demand, and prices of products and services published online.

API features: With the API, you can search for postings on a specific data source, according to category and location, or retrieve postings based on a certain annotation value. You can use the API either on search mode where the API gives a set of matching postings or count mode where the API gives the number of matching postings. Furthermore, to enhance performance, the Search API employs a tiered search technique where the most recent data are retrieved first. The search results are also paginated to make them easy to manage.

Pricing: The API is provided for free.

Ease of use: 3taps provides exhaustive documentation to help you get up and running with the API within a few minutes.

5. Wolfram Alpha API

Wolfram Alpha is a versatile computational search engine (also loosely called an “answer engine”) that provides answers to specific questions instead of listing websites that may offer answers, which is contrary to the traditional search engines.

API features: The Wolfram Alpha API provides developers with programmatic access to the computational knowledge behemoth. With the RESTful API, you can add a search box on your application and enable users to get computed results for a wide range of topics, subjects, and areas of studies. The API returns data in XML or JSON data format.

Pricing: The Wolfram Alpha API is offered for free for non-commercial users. For commercial users, it offers varying paid plans, which starts from $25 per 1,000 queries.

Ease of use: Wolfram Alpha provides easy to follow documentation on how to integrate the computational search engine into desktop, web, mobile, and enterprise applications.

6. Web Search API

Contextual Web is a new innovative search engine that uses a sophisticated indexing technology, which imitates the way the human brain works.

API features: The Web Search API allows you to access the Contextual Web search engine and offer rich and ad-free search capabilities on your application. With just a single API request, you can connect to a huge database of indexed web pages, news, and images. Furthermore, the API comes with features for pagination, filtering news results according to published date, web advanced search, and website search.

Pricing: There is a Basic version that is limited to 10,000 requests per month. For extensive usage, you can go for either the Pro version or the Ultra version, which are priced at $99 and $279 per month respectively.

Ease of use: Contextual Web provides comprehensive documentation and code samples on how to embed the API into your applications. It also offers support via email.

7. Algolia API

Algolia is a technology company that provides a modern web search product that enhances search and discovery across multiple platforms and devices.

API features: Algolia offers a full suite of RESTful APIs that allow developers to create state-of-the-art search capabilities, which accelerate the user experience. For example, you can use the Site Search solution to create website search capabilities that visitors love, the Mobile Search solution to create personalized user experiences, and the Voice Search solution to add voice search capabilities in your application.

Pricing: The Algolia API is free for use in small, non-commercial projects. For commercial uses, you can go for any of its paid plans, which starts from $29 per month.

Ease of use: Algolia focuses on providing a satisfying developer experience. It gives detailed documentation, tutorials, vibrant community, and dedicated support to assist developers in building a fast, useful search experience.

8. News Search API

Newslookup.com is an amazing news search engine that crawls and aggregates news headlines from several sources around the world.

API features: The News Search API by Newslookup.com enables developers to access and implement the functionalities of the service into their work environments. With the API, you can retrieve up-to-date news from around the globe, search news according to the type of media such as newspapers or Internet, search news according to localities, sort search results based on relevance and date, and accomplish many other actions.

Pricing: The News Search API  offers both free and subscription-based plans. The paid plan is available at $200 per month.

Ease of use: Newslookup.com provides comprehensive education to help you in minimizing the difficulties of embedding the API.

9. Domainr API

Domainr is a service that allows you to search for relevant domain names for your web applications.

API features: With the Domainr API, you can get domain search results and verify their availability status. The API has three methods: the search method that makes instant query of the search terms, the status method that returns the availability status of the specified domain name, and the register method that returns the registration information of the domain name.

Pricing: If you use the Domainr API to make less than 10,000 requests per month, you’ll not be charged anything. Exceeding this limit will cost you $0.002 for each request.

Ease of use: There is an easy to follow documentation that is full of code samples on how to extend the API to its full limits.

10. GeoRanker API

GeoRanker is a service that provides search engine optimization data according to location. It provides real-time and accurate ranking data from various popular search engines, such as Google, Yandex, and Bing.

API features: GeoRanker offers an extensive collection of RESTful SEO APIs to assist you retrieve and monitor search results through more than 50,000 local IP addresses around the world. For example, its Rank Tracker API allows you to check the positions of keywords according to the specified location, the SERPs API allows you to check the top SERP geo-located results for any search terms, and the Related Keywords API allows you to discover the most profitable keywords in your niche.

Pricing: GeoRanker offers a free trial period for testing the API. Thereafter, your account will be downgraded to a free account with limited features. If you need a more enhanced usage, you can opt for any of its paid plans, which starts from $99 per month.

Ease of use: There is detailed technical documentation and guides on how to integrate the GeoRanker API fast and flawlessly.

That’s Rakuten RapidAPI’s list of top 10 best search APIs. You can click here to get other amazing search APIs to integrate into your application. We hope you’ll find an API that you can use to create satisfying search and discovery experiences for your users!

Search engine APIs and vertical search API can be used together to create interesting applications. Check out our list of the best jobs API for some inspiration.

About Rakuten RapidAPI

Rakuten RapidAPI is the world’s largest API marketplace with 8,000+ third-party APIs and used by over 500,000 active developers. We enable developers to build transformative apps through the power of APIs. Find, test and connect to all the APIs you need in one place!

Check out some of the world’s best APIs including Microsoft, Sendgrid, Crunchbase and Skyscanner.

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