API limit: how does it work?

Shawn,

I use your tool to tracker 71 keyords and 15 domains. I would have thought that that would have allowed me to to multiple searches in any 24 hour period.

I never do more than two searches a day, but if I do a search late in the evening I invariably get the:
Google returned the following error:
Exception from service object: Daily limit of 1000 queries exceeded for key
message when I do my next normal morning run on the tracker.

Can you explain why?

 

Let me ask the question another way. The API is good for 1,000 queries in a 24 hour period I believe. With 71 keywords and 15 domains how many queries am I making on one pass? I would think that was 86 queries. But it appears to be something closer to 500????

 

Bob

It all depends where the postion is and how deep you want to go - for example in february I was tracking one of my sites and decided to put down a bundle of new pages at the same time some of my prases got dumped. So....

They give you the 9999 call [200 selected in KWT]

Thus for lets say, 10 phrases, it would mean 20 passes of 10 "lookups" per pass to find that each site is at 200+ for each phrase - 10 phrases means 100 uses of your API means with 10 sites you have done your dosh.

I did my dosh very quickly.

So I went and asked my partner B Good to select his API key for his site and do the seaches as only one key is allowed per person and his wife amazingly said that she would like her site to be selected as well. Then there was Jack Russell who said that will do well for him too so I showed him how to set it up as well.

You could have knocked me over with a feather as to how many people were interested in tracking their sites and they even were interested in other sites as well - any way they are all happy now.

And so am I

 

FYI FWIW: I did some some testing to try to determine exactly when the 24-hour Google API key limit resets but my data was a bit sketchy.

In terms of determing if you will run outa keys, it's a fairly simply calculation - 10 results per query ... so if you are looking 100 deep, the worst possible case is you would run out of your 1,000 queries (assuming you only do once/day) on the 101st keyword. Do it twice a day, and you could be SOL if more than 50 keywords. Note that this is the WORST possible case since hopefully at least SOME of your keywords rank in the top-100 and are found before all 10 queries are used. Note also that
because Shawn (smart dude that he is ;-) starts the search where it was last found if you check a particular keyword, there is a bit of optimization going on there that can dramatically reduce the number of queries needed and speed things up quite a bit.

He's allready noted his FAQ which is pretty darn good IMHO and answers these types of questions quite well.

alek