Monday, August 31, 2009

A well earned retirement for the SOAP Search API

There’s a time for everything in life: a time for playing, learning & growing up; a time for maturing, working & performing, and a time for retiring, relaxing & handing the reigns over to the next generation. This is true for products too, and this is why, six months ago, we announced our Labs program for Google Code. This program provides clear distinction between graduate developer products where you’ll find mature products with transparent deprecation policies which you can count on for the long run, and labs developer products where you can explore our newest products and get started with them early.

As we also said in that announcement, the time has come for the SOAP Search API to retire – the new generation is around, has graduated, and has largely taken over already as a better and more versatile solution for the vast majority of use cases. In the spirit of our deprecation policies, we’ve continued to support the SOAP Search API since its deprecation in 2006, but we wanted to remind you that it is finally sunsetting. That had been planned for today, but we thought we'd give the few of you still using it another week to be prepared, so we'll be shutting it down on September 7th instead.

19 comments:

  1. Thanks, I finally got the darn thing running yesterday (August 31, 2009) on the Domino platform. In the meantime (today) I'm suddenly getting an insufficient quota for my old key. Is that Google telling me it won't work from now on?

    Is there anywhere we can get an example Notes database that worked like the old SOAP implementation so dummies like me can figure out how to plagiarize the code and get it back online? If so, a real quick email to mailto:bschless@rasco.com would be most appreciated.

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  9. Our reports notably stopped running on the 8th. I did note however that Web Position Gold is still working as of the 10th of September. Do you suppose they are using AJAX as alternative or yet another alternative? If you want a way to get google organic search results, what do you do instead of SOAP?

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  10. The fact is that many companies and end users still want to see their SEM campaign results, and organic is one third of that (at a minimum). If you want to see traffic/leads/conversions/sales by keyword, you're going to want to include organic as a portion of that.

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  11. This is dreadful news. The AJAX alternative is just not suitable for my applications. Please bring back the SOAP API. I would be willing to pay - as I suspect many others would.

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  12. Sounds like they (Google) wants to make sure people are exposed to ads. Oh well, that's an opportunity for Bing then...

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  14. I am guessing its because they dont want people to reorder results.

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  15. i like that.. thank you google

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  16. Good vision Google. SOAP/WSDL is so crippled that I'm afraid it is beyond repair. Long live simpler interfaces.

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  17. Unfortunately, I cannot find anyway of displaying custom Google search results that browse every domain without violating terms of service (talking about scraping, btw). I need the search data and doing it manually sucks because research takes 1000x longer. It's not like their servers can't handle it. This move is a budget cut and a disservice to the online marketing community. Haters for real.

    HATERADE IS ALWAYS COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE.

    If everyone is going to turn around and scrape the results, that actually puts more stress on the search engines in the long run because returning full results is harder on the systems than returning partial results. Fortunately, Google can scrape itself using their own spreadsheets... can't ban their own domain name, can they? Na, and they ain't going to ban me either.

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  18. Hi Squizz, Devin & Bjourne, do your apps use this search api? Maybe I can help. Can you let me know your emails please?

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  19. So for what was this Key actually ?

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