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Google Kills API
Wow. I must have been under a rock when I missed that Google killed their web services search API. Tim O’Reilly’s blog noted this a week ago. And I got it from Phil Wainewright’s blog, where he says Google retreats back to Web 1.0:
The quiet deprecation of Google’s original SOAP search API earlier this month, which has just come to light this week, is a revealing admission of Google’s single-minded reliance on advertising as a means of funding its continued growth and profitability. Put bluntly, it confirms Google’s abject failure to monetize its API except by the indirect mechanism of contextual advertising. Thus Google is now asking developers to sign up instead to an AJAX API, which presents ads on a user’s screen alongside the requested search results. That’s no use for the API mashups that Google’s SOAP search API was one of the first to popularize, long before the term ‘mashup’ existed.
Google’s track record is in stark contrast to Amazon, which has had several APIs emerge from (sometimes long-running) beta programs as pay-per-use commercial propositions, and is now building a serious business around those APIs, serving an expanding community of developers.
This is a useful point - Google makes money with advertising. It does that well. The search engine gives a fantastic inventory for that advertising, so it gets to be the seller of content and broker on other sites (conflict of interestin in a major way as well), but the web services API, disconnected from advertising per se, was outside of the domain that it can do well (at least, from a business point of view).
There is a lot of money to be made providing inventory for advertising on the web, but I am a lot more excited about opportunities that have more direct revenue models, and involve the more interesting back-end integrations. Google’s state shows how hard that is, and how the allure of a very profitable business inhibits innovation.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing - Google is profit-maximizing, which it desperately needs to do with an incredibly inflated (PE of 58!) stock price.
And others pick up the innovation slack. In addition to us Davids, there are still Goliaths in the room: Yahoo and MSFT have web service APIs available, and Amazon has a play in search as well, that is tied into its fantastic web services network.