Some things never make it out of Beta. Recently, Google deprecated their SOAP-based Search API (Beta) in favor of an AJAX Search API. With this sudden announcement, Google is no longer issuing keys and has even pulled their SOAP API SDK out.

Want to integrate web search into your app? The SOAP APIs let you dispatch requests to the search servers and get responses (think ordered lists), that you could display however you choose to, or generally do whatever you wanted with them. Google���s new AJAX API replacement is much in the mold of AdSense and YouTube APIs: it occupies an ���island��� on your user interface real estate. Context and basic customization options aside, you have no control over what gets shown in that island.

Tea leaves
For a variety of reasons, developers have found this to be a worrisome turn of events. Apparently, in addition to the loss of flexibility, there wasn���t any advance notification on this decision, nor a REST or GData replacement API. The AJAX APIs (currently) allow 8 results only, a departure from the flexibility of the old SOAP APIs. Google���s Terms Of Service forbid you from hacking on the AJAX API and screen scraping results or manipulating the server to give you the data and not the UI with it.

From an API use perspective, this is a step forward for novice web developers and folks who could care less about aesthetics and user experience on their web sites. With that audience, it is difficult to argue against the idea of adding search to a website with just a couple lines of script and markup. By sheer numbers, I suspect that demographic makes up the 80% of Google���s audience for these APIs. Moreover, by supporting only the AJAX model instead of multiple alternates, Google seems to be marshaling the proverbial 20% of their resources to this effort. So the Pareto principle (80/20 rule) seems to be in full play here.

Web developers of the world, all is not lost! Live Search offers you a SOAP-based API. Yahoo! Search offers REST-based APIs. If you care about sanctity of APIs or just want complete control over results, you should consider moving over. Both these are excellent search services from very developer-focused companies.

Geeks need to take a chill pill
The blogosphere is rife with conspiracy theories and some folks make this out to be a technical battle between SOAP and REST or SOAP and AJAX or APIs and widgets. I do not think that is the case at all. Google���s decision seems to be based on business decisions, not technical. As a data and service provider, Google is looking for a way to monetize the service. This way, they can inject ads and cross-promotions into the results widget. If this snowballs into a trend, it portends an end to the days of building mashups by freeloading on data from the cloud. But again, Google has probably calculated that mashups account for almost nothing on their bottom line.


Tags: Search, SOAP