Google to Offer API

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."

Comments

Cool, but....

[Patman]

This is very cool, but how long will it last? How will Google make many(and by extension, stay open) when you don't even have to visit their site?

Cool feature

[Rock 'N' Troll]

Good idea. By the way, shouldn't /. have a specific "Google" topic?

This is the beginning of the revolution

[astrashe]

This is really fantastic. I can already think of a dozen scripts or so that I'd like to write to take advantage of this. I love the fact that this is from a Ruby list, and it's about Google. It's not MSDN and MSN.

They'll need a business model of some sort -- without the ads, and with the potential this has to hammer their servers, they'll need to meter access to the API in some way. But I'll pay -- where do I sign up?

I'll bet that this is how they'll end up making most of their money a couple of years from now.

Cool!

[geddes]

For my high school senior project I wrote a Java program that made specific searches on google, and parsed the results. I spent 3/4 of my time perfecting the nasty string manipulation to strip out the HTML and isolate indivisual results, urls, etc. in my own databse. Had the API come out two years ago, I would have spent a lot less time on that thing. Way to go Google!

Could this be in response to the supposed competition from tokohma? open up thier results in some way to increase thier usage?

This sounds cool, but..

[Idimmu Xul]

Some unscrupulous players could surely abuse this by 'making their own' search engines that essentially rip off google without any hassle what so ever?
Ok, it can be done already, but this would make it possibly too easy...?

Also, this will miss out their ads etc that they get revenue from, I wonder what their long term stratagy is?

Re:Cool, but.... They never said if was free!

[BrynM]

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?

We'll just have to wait and see...

Ode to Google :)

[Khalid]

Google has been an enchantment for me since it's beginning !

They have always made the right decision ! they have offered internet users an incredible asset ! and I was so much grateful when they decided to rescue Deja, a site something I just don't know how I can leave without !

I view them as the most "honest and fair" site on the Net ! and without any doubt the most useful too.

Go Google ! you are showing the right way ! to all these stupid-crapy-portal sites which have invaded the net, I just hope you manage to stay in business and prosper for a loooooong, looooong time :)

Pay-per-placement will pay for this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Text ads shmext ads. They can easily be ignored. The thing that will pay for this kind of access is actually Google's pay-per-placement plan. Advertisers will pay for their sites being ranked high, not for their banners being shown to us. Any application that uses this API to search google will return those sponsored results, which is as good as a banner view. Actually, if it's targetted (only sponsored sites that are relevant to your search will be shown), both users and sponsors will be pleased.

Re:Cool feature GREAT IDEA!

[phoxix]

seriously,

all of us do nothing but rave about google day and night

for it is a search engine we love, with a company many of us have come to love

I for one would love to see google have its own slashdot icon

Come to think of it, there are plenty of USELESS icons none of us give a damn about

the following are a few:

Beanies
E+(huh?)
OS 9

Heres hoping for a new google icon!!

Just my two cents, all taxes included

Sunny Dubey

Barter worked for a long time...

[Hooya]

..and may work again. I think google is in a unique position where they could make a value proposition by using a combination of a barter system and of course the monetery system. consider this: google could have one of two modes of payment:

• 1) you pay a subscription fee ($/query, or flat fee, a combination of both like the utilities... whatever works best).
• 2) for people that don't want to pay, or cannot afford to pay... put up a barter system. the way that would work is, the subscriber gives up clock cycles (in the SETI@home fashion to build up 'karma' or 'virtual money' that can be used to pay for the subscription system mentioned previously. That way people who cannot or don't want to pay for the service directly in real-dollars can keep their computers on and earn google-dollars to later redeem it.

  • Google benefits from the monetery system in an obvious way. They also benefit from the barter system by vastly adding to the crunch power which hopefully improves their indexing/grading system. Unused clock cycles which would otherwise be wasted can now earn some value for the users and at the same time give google the 'value' for providing their service.

    So their 'open' system if presented in the form of barter could actually work for the advantage of both parties involved.

No contradiction

[fm6]

The "Personal Use" restriction means that you can't download results for Google than pass them on as your own product. There's no restriction on downloading and reformarting results for your own use. Nor on applications that help you do it. There are already a lot of products that do this -- including plugins for all the major browsers.

On the other hand, Google would obviously not want you to set up your own search site that passes queries to their engine, harvests the results, and presents them on your own site. That is the obvious target of the "Personal Use" restriction.

As for the "Automated Query" restriction -- well, what do you think they mean by "Automated"? Programmatic access to their engine? They couldn't prevent that even if they wanted to. "Automated" obviously means programs that issue hundreds of queries for data mining purpose. Example: crawling the Groups archives to harvest email addresses.

(This was a matter of some concern to me, when I noticed that the Google Usenet archives included all my company's private groups. I'd innocently used by real corporate email, innocently thinking that the groups weren't accessible outside the company. But the spam volume is still very low. Their bot detection software must be quite good.)

Note that making a simple API available doesn't enable any new kind of access to the Google engine. A clever programmer can already parse the HTML results. The API just makes it easier -- and gives Google another product they can sell licenses for.

Re:This is great.

[shayne321]

Text ads... Open standards for content distribution... If only certain other sites would follow...

Apples and oranges... Google's bread and butter is their patented PageRank technology, which they license for what I'm sure is a lot of money. Slashdot, having made the decision to opensource slashcode do not have this option, therefore we're forced to endure banner ads and subscriptions as their only source of revenue. Ironic, eh? The people that screamed so loud about how long it took ./ to release the source for slash are now bitching about subscriptions and banner ads.. Like it or not, if slashcode was proprietary it could be sold and licensed and you wouldn't have to see ads here (or at least not the larger ones). Sourceforge figured this out too late, and are now trying to sell the SourceForge software as a source of income.

Hopefully ./ will wise up and figure out if they ever want to make any real money they'll have to offer a real service.. Like consulting to companies/webmasters to setup slashcode for customers (like MySQL AB does)... Too bad VA Linux went out of the hardware market. I think a pre-configured "Slash Appliance" (sort of like google's Search Appliance) would be cool as hell for companies needing an internal collaboration system. ./ has really missed the boat here, IMHO.

Shayne

Slash could use this.

[Perdo]

Slash either needs to get a Google box or use these APIs to fix their search feature. There is so much haystack data compared to good needles on Slashdot and the search is so bad that most of the great gems of knowlege that Slashdot has generated might as well have never existed. It can take an hour to find even a popular poster's comments.

Need to reference John Carmack's comments? Sorting him out of the masses is next to impossible. Even a comment poster as prolific as Signal 11 (arguabley slashdots first and greatest Karma Whore) is nearly impossible to find. First 30 matches of how many? You want to sort through jeffy124's 700+ comments and 24 submitted stories just to find the pertinate one I need by hand? Not to mention the benefit to Slashdot's editors, being able to follow a clear history of articles on a given subject to look for repeats and make more informed editorial commentary. If 90% of readers never read the comments, the editors owe that 90% the sort of editorial commentary attached to each story that only good research can provide.

In fact, the editors could try it on an interim basis immediately, and provide the service to readers only if they had the resources. I sort of get the feeling that the editors are still thinking of slashdot as a small time blog run out of their apartment closet server.

Run google on slashdot now and you get the news from three weeks ago. Incorperate a google box or google APIs into Slash so I could search today's news and I would Pay 10 cents of subscription funds per search in a heartbeat.

Editors: look at the number of hits to your current broken search engine. Double that number because a dedicated google box would be so much better it would get used a whole lot more. Multiply that by 10 cents per search. See if the numbers work to afford the initial expenditure to get a nice yellow rack mount google box. Slashdot is sitting on a goldmine of data and no one can search it and Slashdot cannot profit from it without a nice pay per search subscription using the best engine available.

Re:been done...

[PhuCknuT]

Yeah, but if it didn't need to parse html, it would be better for the client AND google in terms of cpu and bandwidth usage.