How to increase google custom search quota for image search beyond 10000?

Question

The app I work on has previously used the Google Image Search API to allow users to search for images to use in their document. The API has been deprecated for a long time, and google finally pulled the plug on it, which meant that we had to move to its supposed replacement, custom search.

There is now a maximum of 10000 requests per day per app. We reach that quota in about half a day (apparantly users really like our google image search integration). We have contacted multiple contacts at google, and looked for any documentation on getting a higher quota without any luck.

Also, users seem to start getting 403s saying that the limit is exceeded even before we have reached the quota.

Does anyone know how we can increase our quota above 10000, or why we are getting throttled before we reach the limit? Alternatively, does anyone know of a better fit for replacing Google Image Search API? We do want it to be Google image search, so not bing or yahoo or something like that.

Answer 1

Currently, you can't, at least not via any official channel. You used to be able to "Request more", but it was removed. Even when it was present, I'm not sure how often Google actually increased the limit.

If you need to do more than 10k searches per day, consider using another search engine with better API limitations, e.g. Bing, which offers up to 20m requests per month at $0.002 per request.

The only other workaround is to create multiple Google API projects, and round robin your requests among them.