what does that mean? they won't be giving out api keys or they wont allow people to use them even if they already have them?
That is bad news minstrel. I use the Soap Web Service in some of my ASP.NET applications and it makes it fairly easy to develop custom search apps inside Visual Studio. For 1 thing I am not really all that great with javascript hehe and I think Google is making a huge mistake on only using a Javascript API.
From Tom Stocky of Google posted on Google Groups: Hmm, no more keys, that's going to cause a few issues for some products.
google turn everything into javascript... that doesn't sound good to webmasters. I would rather use google soap api and have full control on the interface.
Post your thoughts and wishes about that you don't like the update over here - http://groups.google.com/group/Google-AJAX-Search-API/ !
they want you to move to ajax so that they can inject ads into the feed. they will close this service down eventually .. thats just my gut feeling
Busty... They better not close down the program. There's so many people who made scripts that work around there API keys, if they did that, it would be VERY unprofessional. I don't mind much that they don't give out anymore API keys but if they cancel the program for everyone who is already involved in using API keys, that would be F-ed up.
Google are cool and everything, but sometimes I wish they would just charge a fair price for their services and stop being all mickey mouse about it. Google analytics - classic example. We could get 5 bucks per month per site easy from our clients for good statistics, but instead we had to go through the trauma of having max 5 websites per account (it's all sweet now of course). Google should have just made out lives a bit easier by charging a fair price for a "pro" version which had more features and less restrictions. Same with the Google API - I'll be willing to wager there would be thousands of webmasters happy to part with some cash to be able to up the 1000 per day API limit, and to be able to legally use it for commercial purposes. Google is missing the point by not offering paid versions of their services. They offer good services, and people would be willing to pay for them if they were professional about it. I love free stuff as much as the next person, but for many projects I would rather just pay for something reliable than deal with the trauma that free services come with. Anyone else agree?
The soap api had some problems for a long time. Searches took over 5-10 seconds and many times i got a timeout. I think google tries toe save server capacity. Of course javascript can never compete with the old soap api.