A couple days ago Google quietly deprecated their SOAP API in favor of their newer, more fully featured AJAX API. Despite the rhetoric on the web, this is not a referendum on SOAP. Here's why I think they made the change:
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They have a better understanding of their developers - Google originally released their API back in 2002, before they really had a deep understanding of any segmentation within the developer audience. Since then we've learned that there are many different types of developers on the web, from people who wrestle with HTML to JavaScript/DHTML/CSS hackers, to PHP/Ruby/PERL devs, to the ASP.Net/J2EE engineers. What Google has done isrecognize the specific needs of each group and released products optimized for each of them. For example the Google Custom Search Engine is built for the first group, and the AJAX API is built for the second two. The SOAP API is the righttechnology for the last group, but this group has been very slow to adopt web services like this. I predict that if Google believes there is an opportunity here, they will release an updated API specifically for this audience.
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They want increased control over their services - With the SOAP API Google was giving developers direct access to their data and their service, relying on the Terms of Use, the developer's honesty and their legal staff to control how the service was used. The AJAX API and the Custom Search Engine use technology to restrict the scenarios the developer can implement and help enforce the Terms of Use.
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They want to increase their business value - After 4 years of letting developers hack around with the SOAP API, Google now has a better understanding of how they can use it to drive business value, and it is all about site search and custom search. The advertising revenue pays for the program, the click-through data improves their search results, the advertising clicks increases the bidding cost of AdWords, and the branding keep consumers equating Google with search. And all this value lets them spend money to build better tools and services for developers, a win/win.
This is another example of how Google continues to out-innovate Microsoft, Yahoo and other top web companies. Nearly every one of their developer offerings has a clear business value for both Google and the developer, while their competition is still in the "we'll just put it out there an see what happens" phase.