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Google Search API especially flakey recently ...

alek [PersonRank 10]

Tuesday, May 1, 2007
17 years ago3,981 views

Anyone else notice this?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

It's down for me right now (I've checked with FindForward.com, which uses it). Tho they were almost always flaky & unusable...

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

So Yahoo has the best API for web search right now...

Andrew [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

I'm surprised there isn't a bigger outcry from SEMs, since as of this week it seems that all ability of tracking the position of specific keywords on a per-domain basis has been stripped. There is no real way to circumvent the ban, since the AJAX API will only return result sets in chunks of 4 or 8 results (if you were to just manually call GET requests for the JSON results utilized by that API).

Perhaps Google wants to totally take control of this by further empowering users from within Webmaster Tools, but in the interim many SEMs are left scratching their heads without a valid alternative other than scraping, the very thing I thought Google wanted to discourage.

I understand Google's desire to limit the abuse of their results, but it seems unlikely they'd just outright ban the use of their results, unless a) they have something else planned as a substitute (Webmaster Tools) or b) they are trying to re-engineer the search paradigm in a way that nullifies the value of the "position" altogether.

If b is the case, this seems a bit premature and it'll likely piss off a lot of legitimate marketers until something else is available that allows for custom tracking of specific search phrases.

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