FAROO - Free Search API

Devs, Hackers:	Search, Mine, Monitor
Free API	REST / JSON / XML / RSS Our search results in your app No registration required

Are your looking for an alternative to Google Web Search API (depreciated), Yahoo Boss (commercial) or Bing Web Search API (commercial)?
Try our FREE Web Search API!

Prohibitive search infrastructure cost and high priced Search API are market entry barriers for innovative services and start-ups.
The dramatic cost advantage of our unique p2p technology allows providing a Free Search API. With 1 million free queries per month we provide three orders of magnitude more than the incumbents do. An open platform, enabling innovation, competition & diversity in search!

Build your own mobile news & search app, news clipping, trend monitoring, competitive intelligence, reputation management, brand monitoring, search engine optimization, plagiarism detection, alternative search engine, research project and more! Materialize & test your idea in weeks instead of years.

Web Search
More than 2 billion pages indexed. English, German and Chinese results. Sorted by relevancy.

News Search
News articles from newspapers, magazines and blogs. Sorted by publishing date, with author and article image.

Trending News
Trending news, grouped by topic. Topics sorted by buzz (number of sources reporting on same topic).
One main article per topic + related links.

Trending Topics
Trending news, grouped by topic. Topics sorted by buzz (number of sources reporting on same topic).
All full articles per topic, sorted by publishing time.

Suggestions
Suggestions with auto completes for query substrings and corrections for misspelled terms.

URL

http://www.faroo.com/api?q=iphone&start=1&length=10&l=en&src=web&i=false&f=json

Parameter

Parameter	Description
`q`	Query Not all characters are allowed in an URL. Spaces etc. need to be encoded within the query. Multiple keywords are always interpreted as AND queries, you do not need to enter "AND" between the search terms. There are no other search operators supported. The following characters are not allowed within the query / = ( ) : ;
`start`	Start (default=1)
`length`	Length (default=10)
`rlength`	Related length (default=20) : maximum number of related news per item, only for Trending News
`l`	Language `en` English (default) `de` German `zh` Chinese
`src`	Source `web` Web Search (default) Sorted by relevancy Contains all kinds of results `news` News Search Sorted by publishing date Contains only news articles from newspapers, magazines and blogs `news` Trending News (if empty `q` ) Does a topic aggregation (i.e. it groups news of the same topic together) Sorts the topics by buzz (i.e. the number of different news sources who are reporting on this topic) Sorts the articles inside a topic by publishing time For each topic the latest article is selected as main article, the other related articles are grouped in the related property `topics` Trending Topics Similar to Trending News: Trending News: for each topic a main article with all properties + related articles with title, url, domain only. Trending Topics: for each topic all the related articles are provided with all properties (more data, slower transfer). `suggest` Suggestions Suggestions include auto completes for query substrings and corrections for misspelled terms. When using the above searches with parameter i=true, the suggestions are already included in the search result.
`kwic`	Keyword in context `false` snippet is selected from the beginning of the article `true` (default) snippet is selected from the article parts containing the keywords
`i`	Instant search `false` (default) searches for query q `true` searches for best suggestion if query q is substring or misspelled. Slower search!
`f`	Result format `json` JSON (default), JSON-P (JSON-P, if `jsoncallback` is defined) `xml` XML (only for Web Search, News Search, Trending News, Trending Topics) `rss` RSS (only for News Search, Trending News)
`jsoncallback`	JSON-P callback function name The JSON data is embedded in JavaScript code to support cross-domain requests.

Return Values

Property	Description
`results`	Result array
`title`	Article title
`kwic`	Article snippet with keyword in context
`url`	Article url
`iurl`	Main article image url
`domain`	Domain
`author`	Article author
`news`	`true` Article is from newspapers, magazines and blogs `false` Article is from other sources
`date`	Publishing date JavaScript equivalent of a DateTime (how many milliseconds have passed between now and the beginning of 1970).
`related`	Array of related articles For Trending news only ( `src=news` and empty `q` )
`title`	Title
`url`	URL
`domain`	Domain
`query`	Query suggestion Actually used query, might differ from original `query` parameter, if instant search `i=true`.
`count`	Number of results found
`start`	Start position of results requested
`length`	Number of results requested
`time`	Search time Pure search latency in milliseconds, not including the request/response transfer over the Internet
`suggestions`	Query suggestions String array of query suggestions, if instant search `i=true`.

Examples

JSON

Web Search

http://www.faroo.com/api?q=iphone&start=1&length=10&l=en&src=web&f=json

News Search

http://www.faroo.com/api?q=iphone&start=1&length=10&l=en&src=news&f=json

Trending News

http://www.faroo.com/api?q=&start=1&length=10&l=en&src=news&f=rss

Query string Encoding

System.Uri.EscapeDataString ok
System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode ok
System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlPathEncode wrong
Uri.EscapeUriString wrong

JavaScript

encodeURIComponent ok
encodeURI wrong
escape wrong

Cross Domain Requests

CORS

We support cross domain requests for JSON, XML and RSS via CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing).


<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
  <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js"></script>
  
  <script>
  $(document).ready(function(){
    $.getJSON("http://www.faroo.com/api?q=google&start=1&l=en&src=web&f=json",
        function(data){
          $.each(data.results, function(i,item){
			jQuery('<div/>', {  text: item.title }).appendTo('#results'); 
          });
        });
  });
  </script>

</head>
<body>
  <div id="results" />
</body>
</html>

JSON-P

Alternatively, with JSON-P, the JSON data is embedded in JavaScript code to support cross-domain requests.


<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
  <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js"></script>
  
  <script>
  $(document).ready(function(){
    $.getJSON("http://www.faroo.com/api?q=google&start=1&l=en&src=web&f=json&jsoncallback=?",
        function(data){
          $.each(data.results, function(i,item){
			jQuery('<div/>', {  text: item.title }).appendTo('#results'); 
          });
        });
  });
  </script>

</head>
<body>
  <div id="results" />
</body>
</html>

Rate Limit

The rate limit is 1 million queries/month, with not more than 1 query/second peaks.
For higher rates please contact us at info@faroo.com

Rate limits for authenticated requests are applied to the user.
Rate limits for unauthenticated requests are applied to the IP and referer.

If the rate limit is exceeded further requests are denied for 24 hours. Continuous violations lead to a permanent block. Please contact us to regain access.

With 1000.000 free queries per month we provide 3 orders of magnitude more than the incumbents do. Please respect the limits to ensure a free & reliable service for everyone.

Attribution

We really appreciate an attribution (but it is not required).

FAROO Logo (85x35)

FAROO Web Search // Full privacy // No spam

HTML code:


<a href="http://www.faroo.com" target="_top" title="FAR00 Web Search">
<img src= "http://www.faroo.com/hp/api/faroo_attribution.png" 
alt="FAROO Web Search // Full privacy // No spam." border="0" /></a>

Application Examples

Trendy Search Windows Phone App

Helioid Search Engine

Skimzee Web Summarizer

Yasni People Search

JFreeWebSearch free Java library

Visual Basic .NET integration (tutorial and source code)

China Gateway

You want to use the API in China? We have Chinese search results and gateway servers located in China. Contact us!