Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
Good idea. By the way, shouldn't /. have a specific "Google" topic?
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.
So how useful might that API be if you can't do anything with it...
I havent tried to get it to work yet, due to not having ruby installed, but does this imply some sort of subscription service?
Possibly a new way for them to raise revenue? Im assuming that the bold line means the authors key has been blanked out so other people cant abuse this service for free?
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Too much repetition. :/
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
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.
Last year Google temporarily had an XML interface available using a query like: http://www.google.com/xml?q=slashdot
Of course, now it's just forbidden. I am surprised they would go back to such a service, it would seem to wind up losing revenue for them depending upon whether or not people are good about passing along whatever Ad-words Google returns. They could expect the traffic to be low enough to not matter compared to the continued word-of-mouth benefit. Or access to the SOAP interface could be offered as a subscription model (pure speculation on my part).
-Robert
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
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.
.NET Framework community website.
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
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.
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.
The keep adding groundbreaking features to their products and throwing them out as if it were no big deal. Don't they know they're supposed to beat the PR drum every time one of their engineers burps? Bunch of commies!
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.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.