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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

Since I can't post both a title and text:

What's interesting about this is that the API has been officially deprecated since 2010 (and "offline" since September 2014), but today is the first day that it's actually become unavailable.

Edit: Additionally, there are probably going to be big repercussions to the web/average person's browsing experience as a result of this. A massive number of sites (and programs, bots, etc) were using this API because of its simplicity (and absence of registration/authentication).

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This is actually the second time they have reduced their Web API for search results. Google used to offer a very full featured REST API, but then took it offline and replaced it with a weak AJAX one:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.ca/2008/04/google-search-rest-a...

You could actually go cool things with the original API. I used it to power a predecessor to https://friskr.com, but we had to switch web search engines after that change.

That's interesting, I had no idea. It's a shame that the trend at Google has been towards closing down APIs like these in favor of specialized/pay-as-you-go endpoints.

I feel like that's a larger trend. APIs are introduced to drive platform growth and then pulled or cut back once that growth has been achieved. Twitter is another example of that phenomenon.

> Additionally, there are probably going to be big repercussions to the web/average person's browsing experience as a result of this. A massive number of sites (and programs, bots, etc) were using this API because of its simplicity (and absence of registration/authentication).

Yep. My harmless little IRC bot can no longer Google search anymore :(

Why not? There's a custom search API.

https://developers.google.com/custom-search/json-api/v1/over...

Yes, and it's scoped by either domain or (rarely used) types from the schema.org ontology. You can't use it to just search the web.

You can use it to search the web; you don't get the exact same experience as the old API.

https://support.google.com/customsearch/answer/2631040?hl=en

Neat. Now it's just a matter of dealing with the absurdly low free usage limit and absurdly expensive paid tier.

Then it's just a market forces question. Use a provider of search services which matches your budgetary/usage requirements.

Google search web scraper as a service?

Could you provide an example or two of the sites that will be impacted, and how it will effect an average user? I'm not that familiar with this area.

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