physics - 6:19 pm on Dec 23, 2006 (gmt 0)

My first thought is that as long as the search API's are unreliable and extremely limited in the amount of queries allowed people will continue to screen-scrape to get their SERP fix. IMO it would be better for Google to keep accepting applicaitons for the SOAP API (and increase the allowed requests per day). Not saying they shouldn't develop new APIs but might as well keep supporting the old one out of respect for people who put time/money into developing code based on it. Even though they will keep supporting the SOAP API (for now - we have no plans to turn off the service does not mean it won't happen arbitrarily soon) any code based on the SOAP API that is for sale (or open source) becomes basically worthless since a new client can't get a new API key.