Google Ends Support for SOAP Search API
Well, this news puts the lockdown to the SEO project I was working on.
Google has very quietly ended support for the SOAP Search API which allowed SEOs like myself to query the search engine through a SOAP call and take those results and build reports for those looking to measure their site's performance within the search engine. Now, the results from the search engine definitely weren't accurate as manual searches for terms displayed much different results than the SOAP generated results. However, it still provided a valuable tool to SEOs to paint a broad picture of their site's performance.
No more SOAP API keys are being issued and it is unclear as to when the SOAP server will be taken offline rendering all these SOAP driven applications useless.
Google is now directing their coders to the AJAX Search API which is more restrictive than the previous SOAP API. However, now Google requires that a valid URL send the request to the Google server and you can no longer run background processes to gather these results. This means an end to the SEO report generator as we know it and a switch to "illegal" page scraping will most likely occur. I'll reserve judgement on all of this until I fully explore the alternatives, but I definitely see this as an unnecessary restriction that just encourages the more intensive page scraping.
Comments
Yahoo! Search API
In response to all the talk that the "decommissioning" of the Google SOAP Search API, Yahoo! takes their own slight dig at Google with their reminder that the Yahoo! Search API is still available. Now, I haven't used their API yet; however, I definitely will be giving it a shot over the holiday break.
The only drawback I see from the Yahoo! Search API is that it can't help you analyze potential traffic from the search engine that generates most of the web traffic out there. If Google "does no evil", Yahoo! is about ready for sainthood.
Google Responds
Google has responded to the cancelling or limiting of the SOAP search API on their Google Code blog. Now, the most important thing to take away from this is that they are not cancelling the SOAP API and the service should remain up and running. Instead, they mention the shift to the new AJAX model.
Personally, this just doesn't make sense unless there is a heavy infrastructure cost associated to allowing more API keys to be issued. You would think that you would either just pull the plug or continue supporting the product - you wouldn't just leave an end dangling out there. In addition, I saw some really weird results for a few terms including an interesting canonical domain issue with Digg.com (for the term "hagrin", the 9th result was http://digg.com/users/hagrin while the 10th result was http://www.digg.com/users/hagrin. Therefore, although they are not shutting the service down, if the results are somewhat inaccurate and they won't be putting any additional resources to the service, is keeping it alive really even a good choice (although, if you lump the results by domain, the results are pretty accurate - you just have to know how to filter and compile the report)?
I wish there was a "why?" attached to their post explaining why the service was being limited/closed off to new users outside of just concentrating on the AJAX search API. The API hasn't changed much so I can't see it as taking signifcant project time so the issue has to be more about through infrastructure at this solution.