The Google API Is a Two-Way Street

By Jon Udell

April 29, 2002

(The Google API Is a Two-Way Street :  Page 1 of 1 )

Google's new SOAP API seemed to follow a boom-and-bust trajectory. Everyone was excited about it until it arrived. Then doubts arose. "Bah!" scoffed Edd Dumbill in an O'Reilly Network column, "what a waste of space for something that can be done in one line of shell script." Edd's point—that an HTML-screen-scraping alternative to the Google SOAP API is easy to hack together—is quite correct. But the conclusion—that Google's SOAP API is silly—is, I think, very wrong.

From the start, the Web was a network of programmable services. I first pointed this out in a 1999 article, Measuring Web Mindshare, which combined two proto-services—Yahoo's directory, and AltaVista's link-counting—to create a novel service that ranked sites in a Yahoo category by the number of AltaVista links pointing to them. The "web mindshare" that's computed by this synthesis is, of course, exactly what Google measures.

For web services, all the real juice is in the network effect. As amazing as Google is, it is only a single service. To repeat my 1999 experiment today, I'd still have to screen-scrape Yahoo, or the Open Directory, in order to emulate a directory-enumeration API. This, too, can be done with /bin/sh, or Perl. But that cuts across the grain. It requires skills that many people don't have, and effort that most people won't want to invest. Pervasive SOAP APIs will be a difference in degree that adds up to a difference in kind. The activation threshold for making new connections will fall below some critical point. The telephone network isn't interesting when there's only one phone. Google, equipped with a standard API, is a telephone. Soon there will be many more, equipped with the same standard API, and then the lines will really start to buzz.

That said, Google's API has provoked some nifty experiments. In BYTE.com > Tangled in the Threads > 2002 > April