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.

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 :)

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.

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.