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TOPIC:

Google will have an API

5
Pat York
04-07-2002
03:17 AM ET (US)
 Zed, you are my god for this week. Outstanding explanation--I understood!

Erik, thanks to you too. I loved the 'barley caress' typo. I love that word combo. I get story ideas from the damnest places.
4
Erik V. Olson
04-07-2002
03:04 AM ET (US)
 Exactly. The obvious way to charge is by good-old CPU time. If you write clever search interfaces that barley caress the Google Farms, they charge you a couple of micro-nickels, but if you want to do some serious data mining of the Google Database, they charge some serious coin.

So, if you just want a simple search -- it's free, but if you want a value-add, you pay for what Google resources you use.
3
Zed Lopez
04-06-2002
08:23 PM ET (US)
 API = application programming interface, a standardized way for programs to make requests and receive information. Today if you wanted to talk to Google programmatically, your program would have to spoof being a browser, submitting HTML forms and parsing the HTML results, which is both tedious and annoying to implement and very fragile 'cause it'll break the first time Google changes anything about their pages.

People would program with Google so that they can take advantage of Google's indexing of the web to do any of a bazillion different kinds of data-mining... the possibilities are endless. What are the commonest words on the web, and how has that changed over time? Track the rise and fall of concepts or celebrities through their frequency of reference over time. Map the net through social networks a la blogdex (or in any of a zillion different ways.) See what the shortest distance is between two sites. Build specialized search engines to facilitate searching on given topics or in given ways. Perform any of a zillion kind of censuses of the web: how many Baptist sites are there? And these are just some of the obvious things off the top of my head -- there are bound to be a bajillion less obvious really exciting things the hackers will come up with.

SOAP = Simple Object Access Protocol, a W3 Consortium standard for abstracting data objects in XML intended for building APIs that'll facilitate communication between programs running in unlike environments.

As for money, Erik seems to be speculating they'll charge for access to their system via the API -- not a bad bet given how intensively an application might hammer it.
2
Pat YorkPerson was signed in when posted
04-06-2002
08:00 PM ET (US)
 What does API stand for?
Why would somebody program with Google? I thought people liked using HTML.
What's a SOAP?
How does this have anything to do with making money?
1
Erik V. Olson
04-06-2002
06:08 PM ET (US)
 And now we know how Google, the company, plans to make money. These guys are hogging all the brilliant in the world.
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