Google Site Search

» see enterprise.google.com/search as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Google Custom Search arrived in 2006 as a free way to put a Google search box on a site you owned. It worked well, and it paid for itself by dropping Google ads into the results, which was fine for a hobby page and an active problem for anyone selling something. On 2 June 2008 Google launched the paid answer to that. Site Search was the same hosted index with the advertising removed, billed by annual query volume rather than by the seat, and it came with the parts the free tier did not have: synonym matching, and a crawler that would go after content sitting behind a form instead of stopping at the public pages.

It landed on a shelf that already had hardware on it. The Google Search Appliance had been going into company racks since 2002 as a yellow box you bought outright, and the Google Mini arrived in 2005 as the cheaper 1U sibling, capped at three hundred thousand documents. TechCrunch spent May 2008 predicting that a hosted product would finish the Mini off. Google said otherwise on launch day: the appliances were for the documents behind your firewall, and Site Search was for the pages the public could already see.

I was never the customer for this and almost nobody was. That is the strange shape of it. The people who paid were a few thousand site operators, and the people who used it were everyone with a browser. Through most of the late 2000s, when you landed on a company site or a news archive and its own search returned something sensible rather than nothing, the usual explanation was that the site had given up on writing its own and was renting Google's index instead. There was no logo on it and no way to tell from the outside. You just learned which sites you could find things on.

~ the dossier ~

~ the free tier and the paid tier ~

What customers were buying was the absence of advertising. Custom Search stayed free permanently and inserted Google ads between the results, so a retailer running it was handing competitors a slot on their own search page in exchange for the index. Site Search took that out. The billing ran on how many queries your visitors would fire in a year, which meant you had to forecast traffic and buy against the forecast, and if you guessed low you ran out. BleepingComputer was a customer, which describes the typical buyer better than any price sheet would.

~ february 2017 ~

The notice went up on the enterprise.google.com product page in February 2017, and it was not a phased deprecation with a migration path attached. Google would take no new purchases and no renewals after 1 April 2017. Existing customers could burn through whatever queries they had already bought. The product would be switched off completely on 1 April 2018.

That left six weeks for anyone who wanted another clean year to go and buy enough queries to cover it in advance. After that the only ad-free option from Google was no option from Google.

~ the rest of the shelf ~

Site Search was not the first of the enterprise search products to go, but it was the last one left. Manufacture of the Mini stopped on 31 July 2012. The Search Appliance stopped being sold in 2016 and its final licenses expired at the end of 2018. When Site Search went dark, Google had finished getting out of the business of selling its search to other companies, about sixteen years after it started.

Customers who did nothing were moved onto free Custom Search accounts, so the ads came back. The ones who cared moved to a vendor whose entire business was site search, and by 2018 there were several to choose from, because the decade Google spent as the default was also the decade a hosted search API stopped being hard to build.

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