Hello all, I've been working on a cool new program with a friend, and we're playing around with a few of the API's. I've been told that Yahoo's is the best for several reasons. Not only is it more similar to their organic search results, but they support commercial use a lot more. I've been told that Google's is horrible, offers little support, and no longer even allows you to apply for a commercial license. Any thoughts? Agree? Disagree? Thanks, Brian
The search API is definitely workable, but the results do not include any supplemental results - so depending on the SERP there could be a pretty large difference in results, or none at all. I don't remember that Google ever offered a commercial API key, although for certain projects they have increased the limits. In general Yahoo APIs seem to be more robust and better documented out of the gate. I know that Google uses agile development methods - which inherently means that they are more apt to publish things that are slightly buggy and lacking in features. The search API has been around a long time, though so I wouldn't expect it to be very problematic at all. My own search API programming has been rather limited and more just exploratory exercises, so I can't really respond with much more than speculation. At SES most SEOs mentioned that they scraped results rather than using published APIs mainly because the API didn't return results that were worth anything to SEO clients (i.e. sending a customer wrong ranking numbers is not good business).
I'm not really interested too much in rankings and was looking to do other stuff with it, but I'm leaning towards Yahoo just because it appears to be a bit better and it's easier to get a commercial license if needed. Brian
I found MSN and Yahoo APIs are more stable than Google's. Google SOAP API returns errors in random cases such as "HTTP Error: Unsupported HTTP response status 502"..