Google retires five search APIs

Google has announced to clean up and no longer offer five of its search APIs. The search APIs will be retired on February 15th. These are the search APIs for Google News, Google Patent, Google Blog, Google Video and Google Image.

Google advises users of the APIs to start using its custom search API. With the discontinuation of the application interfaces, the standard options offered to show results of the areas on your own website will disappear. These options are still offered as a javascript interface for implementation.

The removal of the search APIs has been in the works for a while. In June 2011, the company had already announced to discontinue support for the APIs. Other interfaces like the Code Search API have been discontinued before. With this, Google wants to clean up the older and redundant APIs and make room for the successors.