google-custom-search.md

Google Custom Search

There are two parts to this, creating a custom search and then enabling billing for your Gooogle Account.

Creating a custom search

1. Go to Custom Search

2. Click Add to add your own custom engine

3. Add a custom site into Sites to search. We wont be using this but is required to enable this feature

4. Fill in the Name of the search engine field and click create

5. In the LHS sidebar, select the newly created Custom Search and click Setup

6. In the settings, enable Image search

7. Copy the Search engine ID to the .env file and save it as CSE_ID

8. Scroll down to Programmatic Access and click Get Started for Custom Search JSON API

9. On the JSON Custom Search API: Introduction, click Create a key and save the generated token in the .env file as CSE_API_KEY

10. Run sls deploy in the terminal to redeploy the app with the newly added Custom Search keys

Set up billing

1. Log into Google cloud and navigate to the billing section
2. Create a billing account and fill out the details
3. In the LHS tab, click API & Services > Dashboard

4. Select the newly created Custom Search API
5. Click quotas
6. On the RHS, edit Queries per day and update this to match your predicted usage volume

The Google Cloud account offers you $200 free credit each month. Pricing for the google custom search can be found here. Assuming your usage isn't excessive, you should exceed the $200 free monthly credit!