I don't understand if it is a profitable model or some special feature you think your users must have or they will leave. I don't see any profit in API, not like AMZN API or Adsense, Adsearch ...
A lot of people use the API to provide useful tools to their users, in turn driving traffic and hopefully clicks or conversions. example: Keyword Ranking, Backlink and PageRank Tracker
The API is a free resource made available to you by Google, providing you agree to their TOS, which gives you access to something like 1000 queries of the Google database per day -- useful for checking keywords, etc., or for developing scripts or applications. It's in part a way of getting around mass submission and optimization programs like WebPosition Gold and cramming Google's "bandwidth".
if i don't use API, but do direct hits to google search, does anyone know how many hits i am allowed? i still can not think of a good use of google api. why do you really care of the result returned from google? as adsense is mainly targeted of keywords and adsense is already allowing adsense on search results.
well for one thing you can't use the keyword tracker here without one now I'm confused -- your initial question wasn't about AdSense but about the Google API -- what are you trying to ask abiut AdSense?
Excuse my partial understanding of Google API. Isn't that just an XML interface to the google backend? Why don't you use google.com's main search for keyword tracking? Google.com's search is pretty fast and the returning result is mostly text. Nothing more than XML. it is very easy to parse. I parsed news.google.com with 5 line code. The value on google.com is less as news carries more value as they are from credited sites with cutting edge key phrases.
API = "Application Program Interface" or "Application Programming Interface" See this page for information on Google's API and here for getting a Google API account and license key. This isn't related to or needed for AdSense, which is a different Google account entirely.
The Google API interfaces with Search proper. It is an SOAP web appliance technically. You can use php scripting to pull 10 results from any search query you wish, up to 1000 queries per day. To scrape the site (as in your News code) goes against the Google TOS and you should be careful about that, at least do not own up to doing it in a public forum.
Are you sure only 10 results per query? So if I want 100 results, I will waste 10 queries? That is silly. Direct search is much better. With direct search, you can get 100 results at once and no limit per day. Just need some extra parsing.
With direct search you can't do things the API Allows... People don't use the API for providing search results usually, its more for use with tools.
OK, then can you tell me how this one works? http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search/ it allows 100 returns. it seems to me that they have more than 1000 query per day, still working. google is not blocking them at all.
I use Google API in conjunction with e107.org. I have a plugin that allows people to search google directly from my site. There are no advertisements in the SERP and the results show up directly in my page.