Very saddened to see 'University Research Program for Google Search' go. Google's index offers an exciting corpus for linguistics and AI study.
The current search API's just don't cut it for proper research (for example: just 64 results per query and 1000 queries a day [1] and the "estimatedResultCount" being off by a factor of 10-100 [2]).
I believe spammers were abusing the Google translate API to spin articles in different languages. This contributed to it being closed down. I don't hope that Google's search API is crippled to thwart the bad apples. Because then those that follow the TOS (don't crawl Google's results) have little recourse, but to halt their research (Yahoo Boss and Bing Api give little solace).
[1] Too few for either deep analysis or learning queries like:
"X is a *" and "X, such as *,"