The point about a Search API is that it opens up the problem to a world of 3rd party developers, as opposed to Google putting up competitive defenses by restric

The point about a Search API is that it opens up the problem to a world of 3rd party developers, as opposed to Google putting up competitive defenses by restricting programmatic access. A few years ago I built a web directory that organized and filtered Alexa's top 1MM websites, using PageRank, semantic clustering, and natural language processing. It worked really well, gave me a holistic picture of the internet that was quite different to how Yahoo presented it through their directory. However building it was time-consuming because Google would keep shutting out the ipaddress I was using, so I'd have to keep driving to the next Starbucks up the street to resume my scripts. Now compare the world of search to the world of mobile phones. Imagine if mobile phones only came with proprietary apps, and there were no app stores. That's where search is right now.