Google Web Service

[joohang]

Check this out:

Linkie

 

[BuckleDownBen]

Thats pretty cool, but I'm not sure what kinds of apps would need/want something like this. I noticed under pricing that they say its "free for now." It would suck if someone used this, then they started charging a lot for it.

 

[joohang]

To coin a marketing term from Microsoft, Web Service is about Integration and Interoperability, right?

Suppose that AnandTech wants to integrate the top 10 queries of "CPU" from Google into their main homepage. To do this, they call the Google Web Service. Google then executes the query on their server and returns the results in SOAP (XML) format. Then the AnandTech server parses the returned XML string and integrates the data nicely into the existing design of the homepage.

That's one example I can think of off the top of my head. It's also great for building portals that integrate information from all over the Internet.

Another cool one I've seen around was Microsoft's MapPoint Web Service. It'd be also cool if things like Yellowpages are accessible through Web Services.

Edit: About charging, I think that most of these services are designed for businesses any ways. So I think that cost is not an issue as long as it's reasonable for what they offer. Also, just because the Google Web Service is available, it doesn't mean that everybody has to use it either.

 

[BuckleDownBen]

I know that web services will be a good thing. For some reason I was thinking what use would the Google search web service be for a desktop application. After reading your post I figure that the big use of the Google service will be to search a specfic website. Instead of Anandtech providing their own search capability(which would require a full text index of every page), they could farm it out to Google. You can already pass Google the name of a website to search.

I see a big market for web services to be a replacement for web appliactions, where you need both a fat client and the ability to hit a database from anywhere over the net. I am going to write an application like this in the near future. I'll probably have a Windows Forms application that accesses the Business tier through web services. This seems cleaner to me than putting Windows controls in IE.