This morning I caught up on the troubling news that Google is performing spring cleaning for some of their APIs. Amongst the damned is my beloved image search API which I enjoyed leveraging in a number of web apps. Joining my favored API on the "long flush" are a host of other interfaces:
These APIs will be shut down as per their deprecation policies: Blog Search API, Books Data API and Books JavaScript API (not the new API), Image Search API, News Search API, Patent Search API, Safe Browsing API (v1 only), Translate API, Transliterate API, Video Search API, Virtual Keyboard API
We can infer that the cost to support these APIs was more than Google was willing to bear. Expect more belt tightening for the web giant, as it focuses on its core business and revenue pipeline in the web war for our attention.
If you rely on any of these APIs I suggest finding a replacement (I'll be looking into Bing's image search API), or better yet replicate the functionality internally or through scraper wiki.
Related post:
- ReadWriteWeb coverage by Audrey Watters