Closer To The Ideal

I had an idea for a new business I’d like to launch, based around results from the Google database, fetched using their Search API. After downloading their sample code and reading their documentation, I wrote a simple script and looked at the results. What I realized, after awhile, was that there was no way to get back more than 64 results. My idea needed thousands of results. I asked about this on the official Google Search API forum and was told that, yes, there was no way to get more than 64 results. I then responded:

You’ll forgive me, I hope, for being confused. Over the last 4 or 5 years I’ve read hundreds of articles at Slashdot and Techcrunch and Businessweek and FastCompany, all talking about new businesses being built around Google’s API. In fact, I just did a quick search for “google mashups” and saw some “best of” articles, such as this one:

http://mashable.com/

Are all the Google mashups using small result sets to build their businesses?

Jeremy R. Geerdes offered this exhaustive reply:

I can’t blame you for being confused. There is a lot of seemingly contradictory information out there! For instance, Google’s initial search API offering came in the form of a SOAP API which delivered up to 1,000 results. While this API offered a number of interesting features, it also had a fairly low rate restriction which limited the number of times you could query it over a 24-hour period. Even though this API was deprecated in December 2006, the service to my knowledge has not yet been discontinued for persons who obtained an API key before that cutoff, so you’ll still find a number of sites and applications out there that use it, not to mention articles that refer to it as the greatest thing since sliced bread.

…
Speaking of the Group, though, even that contains a multiple of different numbers. For instance, when the AJAX Search API was originally released, you could not retrieve more than 8 results at all. So there are a number of posts stating a result limit of 8. Then the number jumped, for most searchers, to 32. So you have posts talking about that limit. Then to 64. Local and blog results were left at 8, and then Local results were increased to a total of 32. Blog result limits remain at 8 to this day, and if you’re not confused yet by all those numbers, you’re a smarter person than I!

All of that said, here is where things stand today. As mentioned in my previous post on this thread, you can retrieve up to 64 results, across 8 pages of 8 results each, with most searchers. The exceptions are Local, which can retrieve up to 32, across 4 pages of 8 results each; and Blog, which can retrieve only one set of up to 8 results. At first glance, this all may seem rather restricting, but I think that, for most purposes, the result limits as they stand now are generally adequate. Does that mean I wouldn’t like to see more? No, I would love to see more, especially local results. Rather, it is an acknowledgment that the AJAX Search API was designed to provide basic search functionality to an application. It is not intended for deep searching, data mining, or SEO operations. And I think most people will agree that, when just running a search for something on the internet, the vast majority of the time, we’ll click on something long before we get to the 64th result OR we’ll refine our search.

It should also be noted that the Search API is NOT intended to be the central emphasis of a website or the core of a business model. The TOU are explicit in this in a number of locations. For example:

“You will not, and will not permit your end users or other third parties to incorporate Google Search Results as the primary content on your Property or any page on your Property [or] display business listings Search Results from the Google Maps service on any Property which has the primary purpose of making available residential or business address listings or telephone directory listings” (excerpted from section 1.3)

“In using Google Brand Features, you may not have the Google logo as the largest logo on your Property (except as displayed in the Google Search Results itself) [or] display a Google Brand Feature as the mostprominent element on any page of your Property” (excerpted from
section 2.2)

So, to answer your question – Are all the Google mashups using small result sets to build their businesses? – directly: no, the Google AJAX Search API merely augments their current businesses and application functionality.

In the case of the mashups that you’ve seen at mashable.com and elsewhere, there are a number of sites out there that combine the Google Maps API with proprietary data sources other than the Google Search API. For example, one site that I work with ( http://www.scrantondirections.com ) has its own database of businesses, etc., that it pushes to a Google Map. These results may be augmented by Google LocalSearch results, but the primary focus is on the proprietary data. Other sites will combine the Maps and Search APIs with some other data to provide unique information. For instance, http://www.walkscore.com
uses a number of LocalSearch instances, filters their results through metric that calculates your ability to survive without a car at a given address, and then shows you all of the results using the Maps API. So it is absolutely possible to leverage even the “small result set” of the Search API to develop effective applications.