Google image search says api no longer available

I am using google image search API. Till yesterday it was working, but today morning it says "This API is no longer available"

Is it officially closed, Or any error at my side

Request

https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/images?v=1.0&rsz=8&q=cute+kittens

Response

{"responseData": null, "responseDetails": "This API is no longer available.", "responseStatus": 403}

The answer I found was using Google's Custom Search Engine (CSE) API. Note that this is limited to 100 free requests per day.

Creating cx and modifying it to search for images

1. Create custom search engine at https://cse.google.com/cse/create/new based on your search criteria.
2. Choose sites to search (leave this blank if you want to search the entire web, otherwise you can enter a site to search in one particular site)
3. Enter a name and a language for your search engine.
4. Click "create." You can now find cx in your browser URL.
5. Under "Modify your search engine," click the "Control Panel" button. In the "edit" section you will find an "Image Search" label with an ON/OFF button, change it to ON. Click "update" to save your changes.

Conducting a search with the API

The API endpoint url is https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1

The following JSON parameters are used for this API:

• q: specifies search text
• num: specifies number of results. Requires an integer value between 1 and 10 (inclusive)
• start: the "offset" for the results, which result the search should start at. Requires an integer value between 1 and 101.
• imgSize: the size of the image. I used "medium"
• searchType: must be set to "image"
• filetype: specifies the file type for the image. I used `"jpg", but you can leave this out if file extension doesn't matter to you.
• key: an API key, obtained from https://console.developers.google.com/
• cx: the custom search engine ID from the previous section

Simply make a GET request by passing above parameters as JSON to the API endpoint (also listed above).

Note: If you set a list of referrers in the search engine settings, visiting the URL via your browser will likely not work. You will need to make an AJAX call (or the equivalent from another language) from a server specified in this list. It will work for only the referrers which were specified in the configuration settings.

Reference: https://developers.google.com/custom-search/json-api/v1/reference/cse/list

Now You can search images with Custom image search API.

You can do this with two steps:

1. Get CUSTOM_SEARCH_ID

Go to - https://cse.google.ru/cse/all

Here you must create new Search Engine. Do this and enable Image Search at there.

Screen(i am Russian... sorry)

then get this search engine ID. To do this press at Get Code button:

And there find line with cx = "here will be your CUSTOM_SEARCH_ID":

Ok. It's done, now second step:

2. Get SERVER_KEY

Go to google Console - https://console.developers.google.com/project

Press to Create project button, enter the name and other required information. Pick this project and go to Enable Apis Now find Custom Search Engine.

And Enable it.

Now we must go to Credentials and create new Server Key:

Ok. Now we can use Image Search.

Query:

https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1?key=SERVER_KEY&cx=CUSTOM_SEARCH_ID&q=flower&searchType=image&fileType=jpg&imgSize=xlarge&alt=json

Replace the SERVER_KEY and CUSTOM_SEARCH_ID and call this request.

Limit: for free you can search only 100 images per day.

If this is just for your own purposes (not for production) and you're not planning to abuse Google Image Search, you can simply extract first image URL from Google search results using JSOUP.

For example: Code to retrieve image URL of the first thumbnail:

public static String FindImage(String question, String ua) {
    		String finRes = "";

	try {
			String googleUrl = "https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=" + question.replace(",", "");
			Document doc1 = Jsoup.connect(googleUrl).userAgent(ua).timeout(10 * 1000).get();
			Element media = doc1.select("[data-src]").first();
            String finUrl = media.attr("abs:data-src");	
		    
			finRes= "<a href=\"http://images.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=" + question + "\"><img src=\"" + finUrl.replace("&quot", "") + "\" border=1/></a>";
		
		} catch (Exception e) {
			System.out.println(e);
		}

		return finRes;
	}

Guide:

question - image search term

ua - user agent of the browser

After I read several responses I compiled a response with images:

1. Access the website: https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/introduction, on the page you will find this part, so click in the button Get a Key:

2. Create or select a project, and then NEXT:

3. Copy the API KEY:

4. Access the website to create your CX: https://cse.google.com/cse/create/new, write some random domain like “www.anypage.com”, (after we will delete), select a language, and define some name for your search engine. Click on the Button CREATE.

5. Will see this page, then click in Control Panel:

6. Copy the Search engine ID for later (this is your CX). After you can set to search in all websites (active Search the entire web, select on the random website www.anypage.com then click on the button Delete) and you can active Image search. So will see like this:

7. And Using REST you can get the results, using this example code (searching for flower):

<html lang="pt">
<head>
    <title>JSON Custom Search API Example</title>
</head>
<body>
    <div id="content"></div>
    <script>
        function hndlr(response) {
            console.log(response);
            for (var i = 0; i < response.items.length; i++) {
                var item = response.items[i];
                // in production code, item.htmlTitle should have the HTML entities escaped.
                document.getElementById("content").innerHTML += "<br>" + item.htmlTitle;
            }
        }
    </script>
    <script src="https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1?key=API_KEY&cx=SEARCH_ENGINE_KEY&q=flower&searchType=image&callback=hndlr"></script>
</body>
</html>

The base code is found here: https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/using_rest

8. After setting your API_KEY (key) and your SEARCH ENGINE KEY (cx), the result will see like this:

Thanks to @Vijay Shegokar, @aftamat4ik and @Alladinian

This is the full URL template to be used

We can eliminate unnecessary parameters.

https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1?q={searchTerms}&num={count?}&start={startIndex?}&lr={language?}&safe={safe?}&cx={cx?}&cref={cref?}&sort={sort?}&filter={filter?}&gl={gl?}&cr={cr?}&googlehost={googleHost?}&c2coff={disableCnTwTranslation?}&hq={hq?}&hl={hl?}&siteSearch={siteSearch?}&siteSearchFilter={siteSearchFilter?}&exactTerms={exactTerms?}&excludeTerms={excludeTerms?}&linkSite={linkSite?}&orTerms={orTerms?}&relatedSite={relatedSite?}&dateRestrict={dateRestrict?}&lowRange={lowRange?}&highRange={highRange?}&searchType={searchType}&fileType={fileType?}&rights={rights?}&imgSize={imgSize?}&imgType={imgType?}&imgColorType={imgColorType?}&imgDominantColor={imgDominantColor?}&alt=json

I am using

https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1?key=ap_key&cx=cx&q=hello&searchType=image&imgSize=xlarge&alt=json&num=10&start=1

Change the API url to Google Custom Image search

Provide the same parameters along with with API KEY and CX.

More Info and Explorer

The Yahoo Boss API is a reasonable substitute, although it's not free and the results are not quite as good.

UPDATE: YAHOO BOSS JSON Search API will discontinue on March 31, 2016

SerpAPI enables to search through Google Images and returns a clean json. it integrates with most of the programming languages: python, php, java, golang, nodejs...

https://serpapi.com/images-results

Google limit the number of search per day. but this service provides unlimited searches...

looks like we need to implement google custom search API https://developers.google.com/custom-search/ says so on top of the page you provided yourself