Google has dropped support for the Google SOAP Search API as of December 5, encouraging people to make use of the AJAX Search API in its place.

Benjamin Pfeiffer, I believe, was the first to report this yesterday at Search Engine Roundtable. Ben explained that “existing API keys still do work” and it is still possible (at least for us) to get new keys by visiting here. However, Google has officially stop supporting it.

Brady Forrest at the O’Reilly Radar says the “AJAX Search API is great for web applications and users that want to bling their blog, but does not provide the flexibility of the SOAP API. I am surprised that it has not been replaced with a GData API instead.”

One of the main issues I have is that Google did this without warning or even a blog post saying, hey, we did this.

Related Topics: Google: APIs

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz