Google has surreptitiously and summarily hacked-off the SOAP branch of its search API, directing developers to the AJAX API without even a blog post. O’Reilly notes that Nelson Minar, the originator of SOAP API at Google, says that this is part of the product discipline drive earlier seen with the ending of the Google Answers program. Perhaps it’s needed discipline, but the developer community is necessarily unhappy with a replacement that won’t fill the needs of the hundreds of applications now depending on the far more flexible SOAP API. Bug fixes for the SOAP API are discontinued, and it is not clear how long Google will support existing users.
