More victims in the Google API Graveyard
Image via Wikipedia
On May 26th, Google announced the deprecation and/or shutdown of many of their most popular and widely developed against APIs, leaving many developers and even Google fanboys feeling dumbfounded, betrayed or at the very least neglected.
According to Google, the following APIs are now deprecated but have no scheduled shutdown date:
- Code Search API
- Diacritize API
- Feedburner APIs
- Finance API
- Power Meter API
- Sidewiki API
- Wave API
- Translate API (v2)
Meanwhile, the following APIs will be both deprecated and shut down (within 6-32 months):
- Blog Search API
- Books Data API
- Books JavaScript API (not new Books API)
- Image Search API
- News Search API
- Patent Search API
- Safe Browsing API (v1 only)
- Language API
- Translate API
- Transliterate API
- Virtual Keyboard API
- Video Search API
- Web Search API (deprecated since Nov.1st, 2010, not in this round)
Since most of the negative comments floating around the web are centered on the shocking loss of Google Translate, here are some possible Google Translate alternatives:
- WordReference mini (widget only… no API yet, but possibly coming soon)
UPDATE (2011-06-01): That was quick, turns out It’s already here - Bing Translator API
- Yahoo! Babelfish (widget)
- AlterVista Thesaurus API
- 46 possible alternatives from APIs listed on Programmable Web, including Jollo a Translation API mashup
Here are some Google Web Search alternatives:
- Wikipedia API or DBpedia Lookup
- Freebase API (innovative initiative now Google-owned and possibly subject to the chopping blocks)
- Hakia API
- WolframAlpha API
- Yahoo! Answers API
- YQL Web Search
- Yahoo! Web Search (BOSS)
- Bing Search API
Here are some Google Video Search alternatives:
- AtlasAPI (web-wide Audio & Video index)
- YouTube API (if this one goes away, I am certain the whole web will revolt)
- Bing Video Search
- Yahoo! Video Search (long-ago deprecated)
- Truveo Video Search (surprisingly good quality for AOL)
- Internet Video Archive API
- Vimeo API
- Veoh API
- Blip.TV API
- HowCast API
- embedly (oEmbed library to extract rich media embeds from a URL)
- VodPod
- VideoSurf
- Blinkx RedLabel
Here are some Google Image Search alternatives:
- Flickr API
- Picasa API (Google-owned and possibly subject to the future chopping blocks)
- PhotoBucket API
- ImageShack API
- SmugMug API
- Bing Image Search
- YQL Image Search
- Yahoo! Image Search (NOTE: also shutdown in 2011)
Here are some Google News Search alternatives:
- Twitter API (lots of useless data, but some interesting news sources can definitely be gleaned)
- NY Times API
- RecordedFuture (extremely expensive enterprise News tracking/analysis/prediction tool)
- Bing News Search
- YQL news feeds
- Yahoo News Search (also deprecated)
Here are some Google Blog Search alternatives:
- FriendFeed
- Technorati (API still being built)
- Spinn3r
- BlogCatalog
- Adobe Feeds
- Yandex (Russian blog/web search engine)
Here are some Google Finance alternatives:
- Wikinvest
- SenseNews (Stock price prediction and News Aggregation/Analysis by Hakia)
- Yahoo! Finance
- SaneBull
- QuoteMedia (expensive, but premium data)
- StockGroup (expensive, but premium data)
Of course, they try to redeem themselves with 8 new APIs; however of the new upcoming APIs only the Prediction API sounds interesting, and so far, it seems like an account with Google Storage is required. For me, the Translate API will be sorely missed, a feeling many seem to have, since innovative Google-powered services like NiceTranslator real-time translations and my own BC$ Subtitling Tool may no longer be possible unless one of the alternatives suggested here can prove to provide the speed, simplicity of use and overall quality of translations (as the translations collaboratively created via Google Translate eventually got much much better over time). In the end, I guess that’s the real bitter point, the fact that Google is tossing out the baby with the bath water and not even considering developer and user pleas to charge a fair price for their best APIs, rather than shuttering them altogether.
You’d think that this would be an opportunity for revenue, but maybe not enough of it would be Advertising driven, which is their obvious core business model. We’ll see how this drama plays out over the coming months, and whether the backlash has any effect. Either way, its time to start looking at the alternatives, its a big world wide web out there!
UPDATE (2011-08-04):
Google Labs Is Shutting Down based on comments made by Larry Page and the Bill Coughran (SVP for Research and Systems Infrastructure) post on the official Google blog entitled “More wood behind fewer arrows“.
Yet another frustrating decision for long-time supporters and early adopters of Google’s various initiatives, experiments and beta software releases. In addition, it raises a cloak of invisibility back over the Googleplex and seems to place business policy barriers in between Google’s talented engineers that tend to embrace, contribute to, and in some cases lead the open-source community – and the rest of us developers around the world – who are not only not on the behemoth’s payroll, but can also easily have our hard works commercialized by the giant who will now divulge even less information about what is in development and going on under the hood at Google.
Related articles
- Spring cleaning for some of our APIs (googlecode.blogspot.com)
- Google Announces APIs Scheduled for Shutdown (readwriteweb.com)
- Google Translate API to Go “Kaputt” in December (programmableweb)
- The Google Translate API v2 has been officially deprecated (code.google.com)
- Google Translate API is now deprecated. (code.google.com)
- Last Reminder: Google Base APIs Retire June 1st (seroundtable.com)
- API Business Models: Then and Now (programmableweb.com)
- Exclusive: Google pulls the rug out from under web service API developers, nixes Google Translate and 17 others (zdnet.com)
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