Introducing the Google APIs Console and our latest API updates

After a busy year of creating, curating, and re-organizing our APIs, we’re pleased to share that:

• We’re announcing the Google APIs console, a new tool to help you use our APIs in your applications and on your websites.
• We’re introducing a new and improved Custom Search API and the new Translate API, which replace the old Web Search API and the old Translate API respectively, which are being retired along with the old Local Search API.
• We’ve reorganized and rewritten the documentation for some of your favorite APIs (read more on the AJAX APIs Blog).

New Google APIs Console Improves API Experience

The new APIs console helps you manage your API usage across all of your sites and apps. Key features include:

• Log in with your Google account to see the API projects you’re working on.
• Create and manage project teams for projects that are shared with your co-workers or friends.
• Get developer credentials to track exactly how you are using each API.
• View information about how your site or app is using the APIs, including which of your pages are making the most requests.

Initially, the console supports over a half dozen APIs – that number is expected to grow rapidly over time. Please take a look at the APIs console and get started using Google’s new APIs today.

New Custom Search API Delivers Better Integrated Search Experience

Google Custom Search helps you create a curated search experience, tailoring a custom search engine precisely to your specifications. This is the perfect tool for helping your visitors find exactly what they’re looking for on your site, and is especially useful for businesses that want to create a customized search experience across their public content without the expense or hassle of developing and hosting their own search infrastructure.
Today we are enhancing our Custom Search offering with the introduction of new output formats and a new API. Now, in addition to using the Custom Search element or the XML API, the new API offers search results using your choice of Atom or JSON syndication formats. To get started, click here to log into the API console and add this API to your project.

Retirement of Older APIs

As part of our ongoing housekeeping of our first-generation APIs, the legacy Web Search API and the Local Search API are being retired, to be phased out over the next three years as per our deprecation policies. We’ll also be tightening up our enforcement of the rate limits for these and the Translate API v1 over the next few months with an eye toward mitigating unauthorized usage, so we encourage everyone to migrate to the new APIs as available on the APIs console, or over to the Custom Search Element, the Translate Element, or the Maps API GoogleBar as your needs dictate.

Looking Forward

We’re excited about the opportunities that the new APIs console and this first batch of APIs built on our new API architecture will offer to developers. Even though we’ve been building APIs for several years now and are quickly approaching 100 tools, products, and APIs for developers, we still feel like we’re just getting warmed up. We’d love to hear your feedback on the new Google API console and our newest APIs — please let us know what you think.

By Adam Feldman, Adam Winer, David Gibson, and Louis Ryan, Google Developer Team