Concepts
21 pages covering concepts.
What Is a SERP API?
A plain-language explanation of search engine results page APIs and what they return.
Structured JSON Search Results Explained
How SERP APIs turn a messy HTML results page into predictable structured JSON.
Search API vs. Scraping
Why most teams choose a managed search API over building and maintaining their own scraper.
Pagination and Result Freshness
How search APIs handle paging through results and how 'fresh' those results really are.
Geotargeting and Localization in Search APIs
How to get results as they'd appear in a specific country, city, or language.
Image Search APIs
What image-specific search endpoints return and where they're useful.
News Search APIs
How news-focused search endpoints differ from general web search.
Shopping and Product Search APIs
What shopping-flavored search results include beyond a basic organic listing.
Rate Limits and Quotas
How search API rate limits typically work and how to design around them.
Choosing a Search API: A Comparison Framework
A practical framework for evaluating search API providers against your actual requirements.
Cost Optimization for High-Volume Agent Queries
Techniques for keeping search API spend under control in agent loops that search often.
Caching Strategies for Search Results
Where and how long to cache search results without serving stale data.
A Latency Benchmarking Approach for Search APIs
How to measure and compare real-world response times across providers.
Async and Batch Search Patterns
When to use asynchronous or batch endpoints instead of synchronous single queries.
Webhook vs. Polling for Search Results
Tradeoffs between push-based webhooks and pull-based polling for search-driven monitoring.
Handling CAPTCHAs and Blocking
Why managed search APIs exist largely to solve the CAPTCHA and IP-blocking problem for you.
Data Compliance and Terms of Service Considerations
What to think about regarding ToS, robots.txt, and data usage when consuming search results.
Result Ranking and Relevance Signals
What influences the order of results a search API returns, and why it matters for agents.
Multi-Engine Aggregation
Combining results from more than one search engine or provider into a single ranked list.
Fallback and Redundancy Strategies Across Providers
Designing a search layer that survives one provider's outage without breaking your agent.
API Key and Auth Patterns for Search APIs
Common authentication schemes for search APIs and how to manage keys safely in agent code.