Google stops some services
By Benj Arriola - Posted on Wed Dec 27, 2006Google decides to end Google Answers on December 31, 2006. Although if you visit the Google Answers page, it is already saying it is no longer accepting questions. Although on the page it is not saying why the service ended, some people speculate that Yahoo! Answers was able to build a bigger and better community for this type of question and answer portal. But in my opinion, if Google really wanted to head to head with Yahoo! in this type of service, I think Google has the resources and technical knowledge to do so. I believe it has something to do with some other reason. Maybe maintaining this site will lose focus on other sites?
Another service that ended is the Google Search SOAP API silently starting December 5, 2006 and is pushing to use the Google Search AJAX API instead. Now there are tons of applications out there using the SOAP version, does it mean applications will just collapse? Actually not, they will still run but they are no longer issuing new API keys for the SOAP search. The reason behind it, I really do not know. Maybe the AJAX search was proven to be better based on whatever test they made, but they can’t just shut everyone off that used the SOAP version. Thus they still keep the SOAP versions running for whoever still has it.
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