14 DAY TRIAL // Google has announced it is going to shut down the Site Search service starting April 1, 2017. This is the commercial version of the Google Custom Search service, which is also known as the Custom Search Engine (CSE).
"On April 1, 2017, Google will discontinue sales of the Google Site Search. All new purchases and renewals must take place before this date. The product will completely shut down by April 1, 2018," the company said, indicating that it will let subscriptions run out before closing the service for good.
Technically, the Site Search service will shut down on April 1, 2018, or when the current paid-accounts reach their quota end; whichever comes first. All Site Search customers will be moved to CSE accounts. Since the two are sister services allowing website owners to use Google's search technology to power search features on their sites, this shouldn't be a problem.
Of course, just because the services are similar, it does not mean they're the same. For instance. Site Search showed only search results from the local site, for a price. CSE, on the other hand, is a free service that makes money by inserting some Google ads between the search results.
Pay per queries while you can
CSE has been around since back in 2006, while Site Search launched a couple of years later. Customers for the latter pay not per month, but per search queries volume. For instance, a package for 20,000 search queries per year will cost someone $100, while a package for 500,000 search queries will run a bill of $2,000. For larger businesses, there are no public quotes.
So, if you want to make sure there are no Google ads in your site's search results, you should buy a larger number of queries before April 1, so they last you at least until next year when the service is cut off.