Google's Custom Search image API dies in 2027. Two traps in replacing it.

Google's Custom Search JSON API is closed to new customers, and existing customers have until 2027-01-01 to move off it. That deadline takes searchType=image with it. I maintain cse-bridge , a small self-hosted service that speaks Google's customsearch/v1 wire format on top of your own SearXNG instance, so migrating is a base-URL change rather than a rewrite. Web search shipped first. This week I added image search — and it turned out to be much less mechanical than "map some more fields", because two of the assumptions that hold for web results are actively wrong for image results. Both are worth knowing whether or not you ever use my code. If you are writing anything that normalises image search results, you will hit them. Trap 1: link is not the page For a web result, Google's link is the URL of the page. Easy. For an image result, link is the image file itself , and the page it was found on lives in image.contextLink : { "link" : "https://facts.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/AdobeStock_209028852.jpeg" , "displayLink" : "facts.net" , "image" : { "contextLink" : "https://facts.net/nature/animals/red-panda-facts" , "thumbnailLink" : "https://ts1.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.I_aIcVvl98DbktQmP297ugHaE7&pid=15.1" , "width" : 4000 , "height" : 2666 } } SearXNG has it the other way round: the result's url is the page, and the image is in a separate img_src field ( documented here ). So the naive mapping — reuse the web mapper, add an image object — produces items whose link points at an HTML document. That fails silently , which is what makes it nasty. Your JSON still validates. Your item count is right. Every field is a well-formed URL. But every client that does <img src={item.link}> — which is the entire point of image search — renders nothing, and it looks like the images are broken rather than like your mapper is wrong. The fix is a rule, not a patch: if a result has no image URL, drop the whole result . Never fall back to the page URL to keep the count up. export functio