16 open-source AI apps calling Google's Custom Search, read at source

5 settings and 11 lines of code

5 projects read Google's address from a setting: LiteLLM (GOOGLE_PSE_API_BASE), OpenAgent (ProviderUrl), Swirl (url in the SearchProvider JSON), Mattermost Agents ("API URL (optional)") and aimux (baseUrl). A self-hoster sets it to https://api.specstream.ai/customsearch/v1 and puts a SpecStream key where the Google key goes.

The other 11 hold https://www.googleapis.com in the line the table names. A maintainer changes that line, or reads the address from a setting, and every user of the project moves with the next release.

What happens on January 1, 2027

Google's overview page says the Custom Search JSON API is closed to new customers and that "Existing Custom Search JSON API customers have until January 1, 2027 to transition to an alternative solution." Its pricing applies "until the service discontinuation on January 1, 2027." From that day each line in the table calls an API that Google has ended. A new user of any of these projects cannot get a Google key today.

The same call, answered in Google's JSON

Change the host and the key. The path, the parameters and the parser stay.

# Before
curl "https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1?key=$GOOGLE_KEY&cx=$CX&q=open+source+vector+databases"

# After
curl "https://api.specstream.ai/customsearch/v1?key=$SPECSTREAM_KEY&cx=$CX&q=open+source+vector+databases"

The reply has kind customsearch#search, items[] with title, link, snippet and displayLink, searchInformation.totalResults and queries.nextPage. The route honours nine parameters: q, num, start, hq, exactTerms, orTerms, excludeTerms, siteSearch and siteSearchFilter. cx is accepted and not used, and the key goes in key=, in X-Goog-Api-Key or as a Bearer token.

$5 per 1,000 searches, with no daily cap

A search of up to 10 results costs $0.005, the rate Google charges existing customers, and there is no limit per key and no daily limit. A busy call answers 429 with Retry-After and is not charged. Credit you buy never expires, and a new account gets $10 of credit, no card.

The most accurate web search API in the world

The SpecStream Search API scores 97.9 F-score on all 1,000 official SimpleQA Verified questions, 978 of them correct, and 64.0 item F1 and 43.4 row F1 on all 200 official WideSearch tasks. The scores and the method are on the benchmarks page.

About one second a search

The Custom Search route runs on the fast search. On November 9, 2026 production answered 718 of 720 searches at 1 to 20 a second, with a median of 0.82 s at 1 a second and 1.07 s at 20 a second.

Search, pages and rows on one key

The same key reads pages with the Extract API at $0.80 per 1,000 pages, and a page with no text is not charged. Deep Search takes a request in plain words and returns every match on the live web as rows at 5¢, 15¢ or $1 a row. A key made with zero_retention keeps no request text and no answer after the reply.

How the list was made

On November 10, 2026 GitHub code search found 25,024 public files that contain googleapis.com/customsearch/v1. We read the 74 projects with the most stars among them and opened 28 at their latest commit. Stars are GitHub's count that day; for Mattermost Agents and aimux they are the count from the code search scan.

The table keeps the 16 AI apps whose latest commit holds Google's address in a line we fetched and quoted. It leaves out projects that reach Google only through a library (langchain-google-community, google-api-python-client), a documentation search widget, tools that are not AI apps, and the 46 projects not opened at a commit. It does not cover private code or forks. The full call and reply are on the migration guide, and Google's dates on the shutdown page.

Vertex AI Search (Agent Search)

Google's named alternative, for up to 50 domains, at $1.50 per 1,000 queries on Standard and $4.00 on Enterprise, plus data storage. It answers a different endpoint in a Google Cloud project. SpecStream searches the whole live web on the path these apps already call.

Grounding with Google Search

A Gemini API tool at $14 per 1,000 search requests on Gemini 3 and newer models. It returns the model's grounded answer, while these apps parse a list of results. SpecStream returns the list, at $5 per 1,000, for any model.

Brave Search API

A search API on Brave's own index at $5 per 1,000 requests, with $5 in free credits every month. Brave's own guide says the move means swapping the endpoint and updating how you read the response. On SpecStream the reply is Google's JSON, so each app's parser stays.