Man, you leave a company and no one remembers to tell you things. I just learned that two weeks ago Google officially put the SOAP search API on end of life status. That was my first project at Google, as well as one of the last things I worked on before leaving. It looks like the server is still up at least for now, but no new users.

Google also recently shut off Google Answers. It seems like good discipline to me; when your corporate culture has a "go fast, do a lot of things, fail often" approach to product development, you have to do something with the things that succeeded in launching but then failed to make a big impact on the business.

I wonder what will become of the Google search developers now. There's the AJAX search API, but apparently the terms of use are more restrictive, not allowing you to reorder or mix up the actual results.

See also Brady Forrest's comments
and my own post on why SOAP sucks
tech
  2006-12-18 19:28 Z