Sassy seems to pull from like.... page 10 of search results for images

Robert Bergman Account Deactivated

changed status to resolved

Thanks for the input. Sassy's search results used to be of much higher quality. Back then, it was using a little known, yet deprecated and free search API from Google that produced results nearly the same as Google's image web search. Unfortunately, Google decommissioned that API after nearly 5 years of deprecation. In order to keep Sassy alive, we opted to start using Google's paid image search API, which it turns out is pretty expensive for the volume of traffic we do with it. Unfortunately, we, too, have noticed that the quality of the search results is not what it used to be. Why Google would charge for an image search API that's much less effective that one it ran for free for years is beyond me, but that seems to be the situation we're in now, sadly. I've considered writing a new image search addon with imgur or other image search providers from time to time, but experiments with those have always been more miss than hit, though I'll admit I haven't looked at it closely in nearly a year. I would suspect that as long as Google's search API continues to produce suboptimal results, the best solution might be to find a more effective image search API, but I don't have the time to pursue it at present.

2016-09-16T20:49:10+00:00

Comments (3)

Colin Godsey reporter
- attached Screen Shot 2016-09-16 at 2.20.57 PM.png
search results for "seems legit" - any of these would have been great for /img seems legit
- 2016-09-16T20:29:57+00:00
Robert Bergman Account Deactivated
- changed status to resolved
Thanks for the input. Sassy's search results used to be of much higher quality. Back then, it was using a little known, yet deprecated and free search API from Google that produced results nearly the same as Google's image web search. Unfortunately, Google decommissioned that API after nearly 5 years of deprecation. In order to keep Sassy alive, we opted to start using Google's paid image search API, which it turns out is pretty expensive for the volume of traffic we do with it. Unfortunately, we, too, have noticed that the quality of the search results is not what it used to be. Why Google would charge for an image search API that's much less effective that one it ran for free for years is beyond me, but that seems to be the situation we're in now, sadly. I've considered writing a new image search addon with imgur or other image search providers from time to time, but experiments with those have always been more miss than hit, though I'll admit I haven't looked at it closely in nearly a year. I would suspect that as long as Google's search API continues to produce suboptimal results, the best solution might be to find a more effective image search API, but I don't have the time to pursue it at present.
- 2016-09-16T20:49:10+00:00
Colin Godsey reporter
Ah, thanks for the explanation! That does make a lot of sense, I didn't figure there were different listing but now that you mention it might be a sudden Google API change, it definitely makes sense now.

Appreciate the response, and best of luck with the future work!
- 2016-09-16T20:52:45+00:00
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