[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built an API for Google autocomplete
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       Show HN: I built an API for Google autocomplete
        
       Author : mjhcodes
       Score  : 30 points
       Date   : 2024-04-01 10:39 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (keywordquill.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (keywordquill.com)
        
       | michaelmior wrote:
       | Undoubtedly useful, but I'd be shocked if this wasn't violating
       | Google's ToS and I can't imagine building something important
       | using this.
        
         | vjshah wrote:
         | i had the same reaction, but i looked to see what google's tos
         | was for things like this and i found https://serpapi.com/ ,
         | which apparently has been around for 5 years and also offers
         | paid services for scraping google search. if their homepage is
         | to be believed, there are large companies using their service.
         | i'm very surprised that google hasn't taken steps to block
         | them.
        
           | michaelmior wrote:
           | Interesting. I haven't heard of SerpApi but that is indeed
           | surprising.
        
             | ch33zer wrote:
             | I was also serprised
        
           | benzible wrote:
           | Note that part of SerpApi's product seems to be
           | indemnification from liability. On their pricing page, the
           | Developer plan specifies "No Legal US Shield" and the
           | Production plan specifies "Legal US Shield".
           | 
           | From their FAQ:
           | 
           | > What are scraper legal protections?
           | 
           | > SerpApi, LLC assumes scraping and parsing liabilities for
           | both domestic and foreign companies unless your usage is
           | otherwise illegal.
        
             | vjshah wrote:
             | if i were evaluating serpapi, my concern wouldn't be my own
             | legal liability. i'd be worried about serpapi getting
             | blocked one day and my own application suffering as a
             | result
        
           | yellow_lead wrote:
           | There's many services like this that want/need access to
           | Google search results. Another is ahrefs which is geared
           | towards SEO.
        
         | sdfhbdf wrote:
         | I wouldn't be surprised if actually it's just a ChatGPT prompt
         | "What google search autocomplete would return for this query:"
         | 
         | seems easier than reverse engineering/scraping google search
         | autocomplete
        
           | jonwinstanley wrote:
           | Definitely easier but will be not be factually correct.
           | 
           | Will be ok if you just want some ideas but not if you're
           | tracking keywords performance in Google
        
         | dns_snek wrote:
         | You can use Google without agreeing to their ToS, so
         | _technically_ it shouldn 't matter, but practically, if their
         | lawyers come knocking, that's a different story.
        
       | gaucheries wrote:
       | Nice work, but I am surprised that you would charge people money
       | to use this, and I imagine that it will be promptly shut down by
       | Google.
        
         | relyks wrote:
         | Yes, this. Also, why pay when you can do what they did and get
         | the autocompletions for free?
        
           | sMarsIntruder wrote:
           | SEOs and digital marketing departments needs this kind of
           | services, especially for a huge number of this queries.
           | Getting this kind of data for "free" is not so
           | straightforward when Google detects that.
        
             | relyks wrote:
             | Isn't Google more likely to detect that this service is
             | consuming their API and then blocking them?
        
               | RockRobotRock wrote:
               | That's the entire value of the API. They deal with the
               | proxies and reverse engineering for you.
        
       | redprince wrote:
       | That certainly helps with not having to deal with the
       | undocumented (?) Google API yourself. The following is what
       | chrome would use to perform autocomplete searches:
       | 
       | curl
       | 'https://google.com/complete/search?client=chrome&hl=en&gl=en...'
        
       | ch33zer wrote:
       | I built a little game based on a similar idea, where you enter a
       | search query and then try and guess what the autocompletes will
       | be. It's still very beta but feel free to try it out. Feedback
       | welcome.
       | 
       | https://autocomplete-guess.blaise.gg/
       | 
       | I was able to get completions by just querying this endpoint:
       | 
       | https://www.google.com/complete/search?q=$QUERY_GOES_HERE&cl...
        
         | srameshc wrote:
         | Love it for it's simplicity.
        
       | kwhitefoot wrote:
       | What's it for? Also it doesn't give the same results as using
       | google.com in the browser.
        
       | jefc1111 wrote:
       | I built https://wwwww.today/ as a vanity project last year. It's
       | in the same space but is almost completely pointless.
       | 
       | Pro tip: clicking through to individual results is probably the
       | most interesting thing you can do. At some point I'll look at the
       | aggregated data collected over the whole period. I'm curious to
       | see which were the most fleeting autocomplete results.
        
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       (page generated 2024-04-01 23:01 UTC)