Google API spring cleaning ends after four and a half years

Google has followed through on its 2011 promise to kill of some search APIs.

Back in 2011, the text ads giant announced it was spring cleaning by turning off the Google Patent Search API, Google News Search API, Google Blog Search API, Google Video Search API and Google Image Search API.

Google reckons it gave you all fair notice, given that it first supported the APIs for three years. And then kept going for another eighteen months.

But the spring cleaning will definitively end as of February 15th, when the APIs will stop working.

“All things come to an end,” writes Vijay Subramani, technical program manager for Google cloud platform, “so has the deprecation window for these APIs.”

It's tempting to guess that the decision to finally kill off these APIs might be one of the first acts initiated by Diane Greene, recently-appointed as Google's cloud Czar and therefore apt for a bit of new-broom-wielding. Leaving APIs dangling for 18 months may be a lovely thing to do for developers, but it is hard to see how it is good for business unless a clutch of very important users were fond of the APIs.

Whatever the reason for the trip to API heaven, developers can hop over to Google's custom search APIs if they want more of what they already had. ®