Google Releases an API for Their Database

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."

Comments

What web services were meant to be?

[SirSlud]

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.

Re:Google saving bandwidth?

[babbage]

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.