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Google to Offer API

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the now-thats-smooth dept.

philipx writes "From the ruby-talk archives here's a little interesting snippet from a post you have to check out: "Here at Google, we're about to start offering an API to our search-engine, so that people can programmatically use Google through a clean and clearly defined interface, rather than have to resort to parsing HTML." It goes on talking about SOAP and I think this is utterly cool."

2 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. Re:DoS Google? by Otterley · · Score: 4, Informative

    In order to DoS Google it doesn't really matter whether you bang on the front door or the back door.

    In fact, an attack through the front door will be more likely to succeed because you're hitting the rendering engine, which takes a lot more CPU time (believe it or not) than the search engine.

    OTOH the back door is lightweight and is as such advantageous for not only third parties but also Google itself to employ.

    Besides, if you're being abused, if you don't want to use technological avenues to keep miscreants away, you can always use legal ones.

  2. Re:Cool, but.... They never said if was free! by Carnage4Life · · Score: 4, Informative

    They could actually charge for a devkit or usage to break even on the project. Even if it did costsome money, I could see it being well worth the price, if it works well.

    I just wonder how it will tie into my app. Will it open my browser? Will the Google Bar plugin be the foundation?

    The post describes a SOAP web service which in most cases is an RPC call in your application of choice. However unlike RPC in days of yore using SOAP to do RPC in applications is relatively easy. If you want to learn more about SOAP I suggest reading A GEntle Introduction To SOAP by Sam Ruby for an overview of the protocol and A Busy Developer's Guide to WSDL 1.1 to see how one could go from defining a WSDL file (as the Google sys admin is trying to do) to actually accessing the web service remotely from a Java application.

    There is also a grab bag of resources on XML webservices at the .NET Framework community website.

    To answer your question, if the Google API is available as a web service then it can be intergrated into any application at all from command line to dynamic web page to GUI application as long as there is network availability on the host machine.