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Google Deprecates SOAP API

Posted by kdawson on from the washed-up dept.

Michi writes "Brady Forrest at O'Reilly Radar reports that Google has deprecated their SOAP API; they aren't giving out any new SOAP Search API keys. Nelson Minar (the original author of the Google SOAP API) argues that this move is motivated by business reasons rather than technical ones. Does this mark the beginning of the end for SOAP or for ubiquitous middleware in general?" Forrest's post quotes developer Paul Bausch: "This is such a bad move because the Google API was the canonical example of how web services work. Not only is Google Hacks based on this API, but hundreds of other books and online examples use the Google API to show how to incorporate content from another site into a 3rd party application."

4 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. who cares by NynexNinja · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Personally I've been using my own API to google's search engine for much longer than google has put out an API... Ultimately screen scraping works and although you may have to spend a little bit longer getting the work done, it still works really well. You should really get off being spoon fed and write your own scraper/crawler engines and dont rely on someones API for doing scraping work anyway. I laughed back when Ebay/paypal offered their API for free because I had already written my own many years earlier. Another reason not to use these silly API's is that I dont want these people knowing how many times i'm pulling down data from their network... Ultimately they would probably blacklist my netblock anyway if they monitored what I was using their pipe for.

    1. Re:who cares by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

      Ultimately screen scraping works and although you may have to spend a little bit longer getting the work done, it still works really well.

      That's got to be one of the stupidest comments I've read on slashdot... which is really saying something.

      Could you post your real name? That way, if your resume ever comes in to our shop, we'll know to shit-can it right away. Thanks!

  2. No soap for google anymore by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Does this mean Google has been bought by a french company?

  3. Re:Honeymoon is Over? by mattpointblank · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Because web designers (who seem to me the majority of the XML-endorsing universe) don't want to look at real code, they like to "simplify" everything into HTML-esque tags. I'm all for semantics when they're neccessary but we call it "code" for a reason.