For you developers out there, Google has announced the end of support for several APIs. The news came late on Friday from Google’s Vijay Subramani and it impacts several search oriented APIs.
Back in 2011, we announced the deprecation of the following APIs: Google Patent Search API, Google News Search API, Google Blog Search API, Google Video Search API, Google Image Search API. We supported these APIs for a three year period (and beyond), but as all things come to an end, so has the deprecation window for these APIs.
Given that Google announced this change back in 2011 and that they supported them 4+ years, the news is hardly a surprise. Further, all of these APIs have been replaced with the Custom Search API.
If you are a developer and are still running any of these APIs in your applications, you have until February 15, 2016 to make changes. At that point they will be turned down and will no longer be available for you to use.
For end users, there really won’t be any change to any apps unless the app in question quits working on February 15. In that case, you will know that the developer didn’t update their app. To be fair though, these APIs were not heavily used so the impact should be minimal if any.
Google Search on Android
If you are a developer and need more information on the Custom Search interface, be sure to check out the Google Developer page on it. There you will find an overview and implementation information so you can update your apps to use it.
