[bromix]

The plausible solution would be to provide a separate KEY (or KEYs) for all calls which are not connected to the account - for example all search relevant calls (basic search, live streams, popular right now and related to the video) will have a separate KEY. The search costs us the most of the quota and can even used by users who are not logged in.

Sure, you could even generate 100 keys and pick which one you use randomly. But I would expect google will probably consider that a violation of their terms of service and just invalidate all of them. And our justification, that their API is garbage, won't go very far in that scenario. My suggested alternative, allowing users to register for their own key, is obviously a terrible kludge but google is unlikely to do anything about it.

That said, I imagine one extra key, used for non-searches only, hopefully shouldn't tick them off too badly.

Edit: 5.1b10 seems to work fine, so far.

This would be Plan C