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Google Releases an API for Their Database

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the now-thats-a-good-idea dept.

Ben Wills writes "Yahoo! announced that Google Released an API last Thursday. "The service, launched Thursday, is called Google Web APIs, for application programming interfaces. The tools let noncommercial software developers "query more than 2 billion Web documents directly from their own computer programs," according to Google's Web site. For now, the service is free." Google just keeps pushing the limits."

8 of 202 comments (clear)

  1. No support for image or usenet queries... by casio282 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Sadly, though, there is no support in the API for queries on their image or usenet "groups" indices, according to the API FAQ:
    2. Can Google APIs be used to access Google Groups? Image search? Directory search?

    No. The Google Web APIs service can only be used to search Google's main index of 2 billion web pages.

    I'll have to keep on parsin'... Maybe some day.
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    1. Re:No support for image or usenet queries... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Just curious, but do the moderators understand the word "insightful?"

  2. Google saving bandwidth? by shaldannon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why do I get the feeling that Google is doing this to save bandwidth? How many people do you thing scrape Google for results? How much load are they going to save if people use the API rather than searching and scraping? That's what I thought...

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    1. Re:Google saving bandwidth? by babbage · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Well, exactly. This is really where things should be going. Think about it. If a user can express exactly what they want from an online resource in a terse but complete way, then both the user and the resource provider come out ahead. Neither side wants to deal with the extra overhead of serving whole pages of HTML formatting when [a] you just want the hits on a given search query and [b] Google doesn't want to pay the extra bandwidth charges.

      Allowing power users to target requests more efficiently is a boost to both sides here -- even if Google doesn't charge a nominal fee for this, the bandwidth savings could still put them ahead of where they would have been under a more traditional HTTP/HTML transaction. You phrase your comment in a very cynical way, but really this seems like a great thing to me. One of the biggest burdens in getting info from the web is having to manually scrape it out of a web browser (or muck around with say LWP and HTML parsers). With an API like this, we can see more applications such as Watson, that aggregate the data & cut through all the web crap that makes finding information tedious. This is where everything is going with SOAP, .NET, MONO, XML-RPC, and so on, and I for one am glad to see a great company like Google leading the way.

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  3. What web services were meant to be? by SirSlud · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Am I one of the only people that contend that THIS is what the whole 'web services' thing is all about?

    I think this is ultra cool. Imagine, if you made an application that had skins or used plugins, or whatever. You could have an in-app browser, powered by google, to search for new add-ons to applications, etc.

    Actually, the possibilities are quite cool.

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    "Old man yells at systemd"
  4. Re:Heh, Google faster than Microsoft. Perfect timi by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Why would Microsoft be pissed? It's a great opportunity for them to show off how .NET works between different platforms. And why would Microsoft be annoyed that it works with Java? WebServices are a standard. Microsoft themselves have had booths at developers conferences where they would show WebService interopability between .NET and IIS on Windows and SOAP/Apache on Linux.

    As for CORBA, WebServices fit a bill that both CORBA and COM don't really fit, stateless and async internet-based programmatic communication.

  5. Good Thing? I agree by shaldannon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I just believe they're doing it for a reason that makes business sense to them rather than out of the "this is a really great technical idea" motivation. (Hence the cynical tone) I agree that it would be good if there were some sort of standard API available (like RSS does) that allowed you to do this sort of thing for all sites. Then again...(cynicism=on) Microsoft would just find another way to corrupt the standard.

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  6. Re:Heh, Google faster than Microsoft. Perfect timi by CaptainSuperBoy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How long will it take the Java developer?

    About five minutes, using the Java classes that Google included with their API. RTFM, man.