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Google quietly axes search API

theregister.co.uk — Google has quietly axed the web services API to its eponymous search engine. The stealth move was made without any announcement, but visitors to the page now receive a blunt message, backdated to 5 December, advising them that the SOAP API is no longer supported.

Who dugg this? Made popular Dec 20, 2006

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  • JamesWilson, on 10/12/2007, -1/+27Someone should axe them why.
  • thefrenzy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12Yes, a new AJAX API that is not only buzzword compliant but has much stricter terms of use.

    You cannot scrape the results and use them to generate reports for instance - which is a bummer.
  • alex.bosworth, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11No warning at all was given - so anyone (like me) who developed an application that required people to get a Google key are now SOL.
  • MikeWeller, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9This sucks, and so does scraping html with regular expressions.
  • Agret, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Wonder why, is there a new API out?
  • thefrenzy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10Nope, still widely used. ASP.NET uses it as the default webservice type.

    True, it's complex to implement, but using a library makes it almost completely transparent - and it's still simpler than CORBA.
  • Protoss, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Fry, let me axe you something....
  • rnwightman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Indeed, the article stated: "Google now points developers to the more restrictive AJAX API instead."

    So it looks like everyone will have to work with the AJAX rather than the SOAP API.
  • hagrin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Exactly.

    My upper management likes to be able to track our ranking within a certain set of keywords that they control via a SharePoint list and I maintain a database of the results, the domains and their positions and then display the data via a web page for them to see the trends. I was also able to do some simpler stuff with the number of indexed pages, inbound links and some other factors.

    Currently, the application still works, but if you read the blog entry of the guy who actually worked on the SOAP search API ( http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/googleSearchAPI.html ) it seems as if they can kill the link to the server generating the results basically at any time and without warning. Definitely not a good thing for something I have working in our production environment.

    As for the new AJAX search API, the fact that you have to provide a URL from which the new AJAX call will come from really prevents this other API to be used in a manner that most of us were using it in the past. Blegh.
  • modusop, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Dugg for the word "eponymous" - good word.
  • Haplo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3If you're using Perl, check out HTML::TreeBuilder which uses a real parser. There is so much one can do with regular expressions. For several examples, see: http://johnbokma.com/perl/
  • wastedump0, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Actually, the only thing that has changed is Google is no longer accepting new requests for API keys. The old keys work just fine.
  • fatdog789, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Even Microsoft gives decent warning when they stop supporting APIs well before they actually withdraw support.

    It's nice to know that the New Evil Empire cares so little for programmers.
  • logomancer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3s/do no evil/publically traded company/
  • dwight0, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Here is a scraper for google: The EvilAPI supports most of the same SOAP calls that Google’s SOAP Search API supports — it just doesn’t use their deprecated API to get the data. Instead, it uses page scraping. Evil? Maybe. But not nearly as evil as providing a powerful development tool to people who are loyal to Google and then discontinuing it without any warning or regard to their users. http://evilapi.com/
  • ferrix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2For perl, WWW::Mechanize. It will change your life.
  • devzer0, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Here's the weird thing: it is still working for me. I have a script that ran a successful SOAP query against Google early on Monday morning. Maybe they axed it after that ...

    If anyone is looking for a way around this -- other than AJAX, ugh, not an API framework! -- then consider using WWW::Mechanize in either Perl or Ruby. Google won't know you're not using a browser, and you won't need to contend with the arbitrary limits. Yes, you'll need to do a small amount of scraping on the results page, but "Mech" makes that pretty easy.
  • devzer0, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Confirmed -- Google's SOAP API is still working for me. Bogus story?!
  • Milamber, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Look up some stuff about Grid computing (specifically for the LCG or EGEE project) - a LOT of web services, WSDL, and SOAP based development going on there
  • skymt, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Scraping Google search results is a violation of their terms of service. Just thought you might want to know.

    From http://www.google.com/intl/en/terms_of_service.html :
    You may not take the results from a Google search and reformat and display them...
  • ChipMonkStyle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yay my key still works. Friend made me an EpisodeRenamer program that uses Googles SOAP API with epguides.com to properly rename tv episodes automatically.

    Reads file names in a folder and subfolders that looks like "TV.SHOW.S01E05.HDTV-LOL.avi" changes to "Tv Show - 1x05 - Episode Name.avi" doesn't sound like a big deal but when you have multiple seasons with stupid names, this renamer comes in handy!

    Would hate for it to stop working.

    :)
  • balkanboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@fatdog

    they call everything "Beta", so they're excused ;) (I guess if it's Beta, that means "we do whatever we damn well please whenever we feel like it")
  • balkanboy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I'm not sure why anyone is surprised by this - from what I understand even the old SOAP API had strict usage limitations - you could not issue more than a certain, limited number of requests per day. Google isn't going to help you get your 'Refined Google Search' business off the ground without making sure they make a buck and a dime off everyone who uses their search engine on anything other than a casual basis via Firefox. (they didn't break $500 for no apparent reason :-) )

  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Splugh!
  • execute85, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0RTFA. They are no longer issuing new soap auth tokens. So no more new users (I found this out the hard way as I was trying to use their API and never got around to registering). So if you have an existing id, you're ok (for now at least).
  • DickBreath, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Could Google run afowl of a Microsoft patent by implementing SOAP?
  • NiLeS, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1they didn't *drop* to $460 for any good reason either.....
  • spect3r, on 10/12/2007, -7/+2Isn't soap pretty much obsolete anyways?

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