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

Google more open to "google bombing" now?

[cetan]

An interesting article on K5

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/15/72154/5065

talks about how now Google bombing is even more effective with this release.

Re:Google saving bandwidth?

[jlanng]

Probably not a great deal. Remember that when you're 'scraping' from HTML, you don't have to load images, css resources etc

Look here for the xml-rpc interface

[codepunk]

Google xml-rpc interface

I personally refuse to support and or recommend anyone using SOAP web services due to the patent fiasco. I asked on the xml-rpc list if anyone knew of a xml-rpc gateway and Dave Winer immediately jumped to the challange and put up a public gateway.

Thanx Dave

Re:What web services were meant to be?

[SirSlud]

yeah, and the beauty is, it 'breaks' the control that corperations are attempting to leverage on their consumer base through their partnerships.

For instance, if FedEX has an API I can hook into, I am not forced to use some partner of theirs [AB Inc, for the purposes of this example] because AB Inc has special permission or some manual corperate-driven method for providing their services integrated with FedEx. Now I can hook right into FedEx myself and not be forced to follow the 'carrot' of seamless integration based on their partnership strategies that force me into 'buyins' I dont really want to participate in.