Never Rely On External Information for Business
If ever there was a reason needed to not rely on external information for business, this is one – Google Deprecating APIs
- Code Search API
- Diacritize API
- Feedburner APIs
- Finance API
- Power Meter API
- Sidewiki API
- Wave API
- Blog Search API
- Books Data API
- Books JavaScript API
- Image Search API
- News Search API
- Patent Search API
- Safe Browsing API
Have these affected your business? This is going to affect an awful lot of people, and looking at some of the 158 comments already on the official blog post from Google, this is not going down well….
That said though, any serious business should never be relying on external companies / data / APIs for any critical systems. Now I can totally see the power of API’s and I absolutely love them, but for any core business needs it can be a little like putting all of your eggs in one basket.
Unfortunately for many large organisations this always seems to be the route taken, the easiest and quickest route which rarely has the long term benefits. My philosophy is always to do something right from the beginning as this saves countless hours in the long run.
As for the Google API’s, well there are still a lot more available to use for the foreseeable future. For the API’s being deprecated I can foresee a lot of further abuse of these prior to these being shut down, such as using the services and storing the information which in most cases in against the guidelines of the services.
Well for now, time to build something more robust in-house – Maybe a scraper which accomplishes the same task 