Hey guys,
A new week, and new energies 🙂
Over the course of the weekend, we spoke about Youtube’s latest transition to TV, and how it may affect televised advertising.
Now, Google has decided to discontinue a product in their arsenal: Google Site Search (GSS).
For those of you who weren’t familiar with the product, GSS was a way to apply the Google search engine to one’s own site, thus providing a way for web publishers to allow their clients to explore the site more efficiently by grouping a few websites in the search, give it the Google branding feel, specify and prioritize certain pages and more.
As of April 1, Google will be transitioning to its new Custom Search Engine, or CSE.
The new engine will differ from GSS:
- You can search the entire web (unlike GSS that only let you search specific ones)
- It will not have image-only search (something GSS had)
- JSON API will have a daily limited (unlike GSS that had unlimited JSON API support)
And more (for the full list).
The main difference is that CSE is free of charge while GSS incurred an annual fee of $100 for up to 20,000 searches/year or even $2,000 for 500,000 searches/year.
How will I know my site has switched to CSE?
Once a customer’s search allocation is exhausted, the switch to CSE will take place automatically.
For clients whose clients will expire between April 1 and June 31, 2017 – a free 3 month extension will be offered.
Google also recommends that users who would not like to switch to CSE, should remove their current search engine.
This move is quite similar to last year’s move when it decided to retire its long used Google Appliance, which was an enterprise level search product designed for companies’ data centers.