Improving search results

Begin with the default search behavior, then add constraints only when the results show that you need them.

Start with the default sourceCopy Anchor Link

If you omit search_service, Search1API searches Google, the same as sending "search_service": "google". Keep this default when you want general web coverage.

Set search_service when the source itself is part of the request:

{ "query": "rust async runtime", "search_service": "reddit" }

For example, Reddit is useful for experience reports, GitHub for code and issues, arXiv for papers, and YouTube for video.

Available web search sourcesCopy Anchor Link

/news uses a separate source set: google, bing, duckduckgo, yahoo, hackernews, and reuters. Omitting search_service also enables the default multi-source behavior for news.

Community sources add optional structured fields in each result's metadata. Common fields (title, link, snippet, optional content and published_date) remain at the result top level. metadata is omitted when no engine-specific fields apply:

• github results carry metadata.kind (repo, issue, pr or discussion). Repositories add metadata.stars and metadata.language; issues, pull requests and discussions add metadata.num_comments, and their snippet starts with owner/repo · issue · open · N comments. A query like "tanstack start hydration error" returns the matching issues and discussions, not only repositories; append a GitHub qualifier such as is:issue or stars:>1000 to search one type only. With time_range, results are limited to repositories and threads created in the window.
• hackernews results (/news) link to the Hacker News thread, with the submitted article in metadata.story_url (omitted for text posts without an article URL) and the vote and comment counts in metadata.points and metadata.num_comments. Multi-word queries match stories containing any of the words, best matches first.
• reddit results are ordered so that posts whose title or subreddit mentions the query terms come first.

/trending supports github and hackernews, and requires search_service.

grokipedia searches Grokipedia, xAI's encyclopedia. Entries are in English, so write the query in English; language and time_range are ignored. Results link to the entry page and carry its opening text as snippet. Grokipedia content is provided by xAI under the xAI Community License; products that show it should display "Powered by xAI".

imdb searches IMDb-domain pages through Google's index. It returns webpage titles, links and snippets, not structured IMDb catalogue metadata. Keep the film/person and the information you need in query; there is no need to reduce it to a title alone. Index coverage is not exhaustive, and results do not guarantee reusable image rights, external interviews or archive downloads.

Read the results, not just the snippetsCopy Anchor Link

Search results include a short snippet. When a model needs the source text, set crawl_results to crawl the top results and populate their content fields:

curl -X POST https://api.search1api.com/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SEARCH1API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "query": "postgres connection pooling best practices",
    "max_results": 10,
    "crawl_results": 3
  }'

This returns up to ten ranked results and attempts to add full text to the top three. crawl_results must be no greater than max_results.

Narrow by siteCopy Anchor Link

Use include_sites to search only selected domains and exclude_sites to remove unwanted ones:

{
  "query": "vector database benchmarks",
  "include_sites": ["github.com", "news.ycombinator.com"],
  "exclude_sites": ["pinterest.com"]
}

Narrow by time or languageCopy Anchor Link

time_range accepts day, week, month, or year. Use it when freshness matters instead of adding words such as “latest” to the query.

Each result carries published_date when the source exposes one, so a model can check how fresh a result is or pick between conflicting sources. The value is ISO 8601: YYYY-MM-DD when only the day is known (typical for web search engines, arxiv, and youtube videos older than a day), or a UTC timestamp such as 2026-09-03T10:00:00Z when the source carries a time (x, reddit, github, bilibili, wechat, yandex with time_range, and /news feeds). Treat the field as optional: duckduckgo, wikipedia, grokipedia, and most Chinese web engines return no date; yandex also omits it unless time_range is set; and other web engines only show one for a subset of pages.

language accepts a language code such as en, zh-CN, or fr. Search1API does not expose a separate country or region parameter.

Control result countCopy Anchor Link

max_results defaults to 5 and accepts values from 1 to 50. The gateway clamps numeric values above 50 to 50.

Paginate native SERP resultsCopy Anchor Link

page is native search-engine pagination, not an offset into a fused result list. It is honoured only for bing, bingcn, baidu, and grokipedia. Other engines, including yandex, ignore it.

{
  "query": "vector database",
  "search_service": "bing",
  "page": 2
}

For the complete request schema, image results, batch bodies, and response fields, see the Search API reference.