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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."

4 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. This is the beginning of the revolution by astrashe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:Contradicts the terms of use by red_dragon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'd assume that the API would be subject to a different set of terms and conditions than those for the main site. Given that it'll probably be a pay-for-use service (as another poster hinted at), it'd most certainly be that way.

    --
    In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
  3. No contradiction by fm6 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

  4. These guys drive me crazy. by fm6 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!