Google has axed the web services API. This sneaky moved was made without any announcement, but of you go to the page now you get a fuck you message, from the 5 December hmmm not sure it was like that last week … , Anyway SOAP API is no longer supported. and we have to use the crappy not working properly AJAX with ads built in which is surprising because the last time a saw someone playing with it they where walking the link to the site to see if the pages still existed,, bring clickbots

DaveN

PS: See this post on The Register for more information on this story and some interesting links.

Edit from Rob:

Bloody Google corporate money-grabbing whores! The search works fine for placing G-search on your site, but it’s not useful from the server at all. Parsing out the JSON from the response and reading it is all well and good, but it’s certainly not reliable and I see many “magic” numbers which I suspect will be difficult to calculate in a non-JS language. Personally I’d embed SpiderMonkey if I needed to (or better – use a sneaky “evaluating JS as Python in a clean environment” trick), but this is beyond the reach of the majority of developers

What Google have done is effectively put a stop to ALL mashup-type applications using Google’s data, which is supposed to be a pillar of Web 2.0. The SOAP API was great because it enabled average developers to use their creativity to make some really interesting applications. Remember that imagination and programming ability are skills rarely seen in abundance together.

G are probably trying to accomplish two things with this move:

1. Increase ad revenue by allowing them to embed Adwords in APIs. Alright, fair enough hands-down that will certainly work.
2. Prevent people like us from scraping SERP positions an all that nasty stuff from the APIs. Sorry, that just isn’t going to happen. Organisations that want to do this via the new AJAX API can and will do it. As I’ve said, it’s not overly tricky for a paid programmer who can afford to throw a few days at it. This is only going to hurt the creative people who make the great mashups.

Sigh.. that’s enough ranting from me. Obviously I’m pissed because this is going to waste a lot of my time. One more thing I’ll say is though: Google seem to have found a way to do cross-domain AJAX. I don’t really have the time to work out how yet, but I suspect they’re laying down <script> tags in a similar fashion to the premium Adsense program (output=js). If anyone has any info on this it would be great.

-Rob