Google has plenty of APIs that they openly share with developers who wish to further the development of their website, service, app, and so on. However there are some APIs that Google has created which are unsupported and unpublished, but at the same time developers have managed to find them and use them.
One of those APIs is the autocomplete API which has been in use for a while now, but not for long. Google has recently announced that starting from the 10th of August, they will be blocking the use of the autocomplete API, which for those unfamiliar is where a search query is predicted before a user has finished typing it up.
So why is Google blocking access to the API? According to Google, “Over time we’ve realized that while we can conceive of uses for an autocomplete data feed outside of search results that may be valuable, overall the content of our automatic completions are optimized and intended to be used in conjunction with web search results, and outside of the context of a web search don’t provide a meaningful user benefit.”
For some developers this will be bad news and for those who aren’t keeping up to date, the blocking of this API could sort of break whatever it is they are doing. However not all is lost as Google has since offered up an alternative: Google Custom Search Engine which is sort of similar and worth checking out if you’re interested in maintaining autocomplete.
Filed in . Read more about Google.