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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."

21 of 202 comments (clear)

  1. for those who don't like Yahoo... by WebMasterJoe · · Score: 3, Informative

    I try not to give Yahoo any more hits after they messed up their privacy poolicy, so here's the same exact story on CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-882252.html.

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    1. Re:for those who don't like Yahoo... by markhb · · Score: 3, Funny

      I try not to give Yahoo any more hits after they messed up their privacy poolicy, so here's the same exact story on Slashdot:
      http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/12/112821 0&mode=nested.

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    2. Re:for those who don't like Yahoo... by mobiGeek · · Score: 3, Funny

      I try not to give Slashdot any more hits after they keep posting dupes, so here's the story as posted on Yahoo! http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=7 0&e=3&cid=70&u=/cn/20020415/tc_cn/google_tests_sea rch_tools_for_developers.

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  2. 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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    :wq
  3. For the sake of the revolution of the world! by Agelmar · · Score: 4, Funny

    The world can now be revolutionized! We can get Google searches on Microsoft.com! The pigeons will come out of their cages and peck the buttons on the Microsoft servers, thus shutting down the evil megacorporation! Hail Google for saving the world! The pigeons will save us all, hail the open API!

  4. useful for sorting by oever · · Score: 3, Funny

    Now we can sort strings in order of google hits!

    Wow, very nice for word completion

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  5. Slashdot Releases an API for Their Database by ajakk · · Score: 5, Funny

    PsPrEditor writes: "Yahoo announced that Slashdot Released an API last Monday. "The service, launched Monday, is called SlashPI. It will allow users to remove duplicate stories that have been plaguing /. for the past year. ""

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    1. Re:Slashdot Releases an API for Their Database by jeffehobbs · · Score: 5, Funny

      In other news, PsPrEditor writes: "Yahoo announced that Slashdot Released an API last Monday. "The service, launched Monday, is called SlashPI. It will allow users to remove duplicate stories that have been plaguing /. for the past year. ""

  6. 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 jlanng · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

    2. 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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  7. Google more open to "google bombing" now? by cetan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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  8. Dont forget.. by josh+crawley · · Score: 3, Funny

    Dont forget that Google released their API for their database...

  9. 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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    1. Re:What web services were meant to be? by SirSlud · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

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    2. Re:What web services were meant to be? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Or an in-browser app that automatically Google-linked everything in a page? Like M$'s proposed auto-linking, but populist. True hypertext.

      Good luck! Don't count on feeling lucky d;-)

  10. Heh, Google faster than Microsoft. Perfect timing. by Baki · · Score: 5, Informative
    Microsoft, claiming everyone should use .NET to be able to use web services (WSDL) just announced their first web service (mappoint) but google beats them. Plus, google shows you don't need .NET but can just as well use Java to make use of XML web services. MSFT must be quite pissed because of this, google stealing the web services show for now.

    Apart from that I think it is a pity that noone comes up with a Corba-over-HTTP standard. As an API, Corba IDL is nicer and more compact than WSDL, and all tool support is already there. WSDL offers no advantages over Corba. The only difference is the use of XML instead of (easy) IDL, and using HTTP as transport mechanism. Corba is transport mechanism independant; current implementations mostly use IIOP, but one could just as well implement Corba using HTTP as transport. Hell, you could even use some XML-over-HTTP as transport, to satisfy all XML freaks that think any machine-to-machine data nowadays should be human readable.

    The only justification for XML web services is that MSFT hates Corba (because of their Not Invented Here syndrome they invented COM+ to compete, also helping vendor lock in) thus they had to come up with something else; switching to Corba would mean they loose their face.

  11. Sounds familiar by Jaeger · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm glad the army of highly-trained rodents that processes Slashdot submissions was able to catch these reduntant stories. We've seen this a few times before:

    The first story even included a link to the API page on Google's site.

  12. Look here for the xml-rpc interface by codepunk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

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  13. 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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  14. Re:Heh, Google faster than Microsoft. Perfect timi by hgh · · Score: 3, Informative

    google shows you don't need .NET but can just as well use Java to make use of XML web services

    Of course anybody who has any background knowledge of web services knows that pretty much any language with text manipulation can be used to create web services. The point of .NET is not that it is the only way of creating web services but rather it makes creating them a lot easier; WSDL, DISCO, SOAP, etc. are abstracted away to make the developing web services easier. Yon don't need to know the bare protocol to start coding (of course it always helps).

    WSDL offers no advantages over Corba. The only difference is the use of XML...

    The use of XML is an advantage. XML is easy to use, and is an open standard. Although binary specs are slightly more efficient in transfer time and space requirements, this is becoming more and more negligible. More important is a developer's time. It is a lot easier to use and debug and text-based spec like XML than a binary spec.

    The only justification for XML web services is that MSFT hates Corba

    Maybe before you spout worthless anti-msft drivel you should research the origins of Web Services. Check out this article by Tim Berners-Lee for a quick intro.

    hgh