Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/spring-cleaning-for-some-of-our-apis.html?showComment=1306481143396#c3564212561169948866

by bauchidgw • 15 years ago

463 180 15 years ago

googlecode.blogspot.com

jmathai3• 15 years ago

I can't state this enough. Building your company which heavily relies on an API provided by someone else is risky business.

Why are we still in this infatuation stage of ignoring the pitfalls of this?

raganwald• 15 years ago

This shit still happens?? and people fall for it?!

http://raganwald.posterous.com/this-shit-still-happens-and-p...

qq66• 15 years ago

I think relying on a free API is the problem, not any API.

When you pay per request for access to an API, at a level that can make the provider as well as you profitable, you can have some comfort in the fact that if your provider goes down there will likely be a competitor to spring up in its place.

saraid216• 15 years ago

It depends on how much of your revenue is based off access to the API. Every moment without access is lost revenue; that can break a startup.

If your startup could survive if you switched off the API, then you're fine.

lurker193• 15 years ago

As long as you are willing to wait 5 or 10 years for someone to replicate Google's R&D.

ChuckMcM2• 15 years ago

I think you can state this in a different way, "Why would I invest in a company which will be killed by Google changing its mind about an API?" I imagine (but it's pure speculation) that folks like YC, other Angels, or early stage VC's should as their due diligence point out this risk and without a reasonable mitigation option pass on funding.

This would 'self correct' folks who weren't doing the extra work.

However for things where there isn't really a credible way to come up with an alternative you are kind of screwed. But then it would become a Google problem if they didn't get API adoption without offering some sort of indemnification in the event they need to take it back.

I presume the 'translation abuse' is people using it to send spam in 141 different languages.

pfhayes• 15 years ago

If the abuse is translating spam, then that's even more surprising - because that's exactly the kind of abuse that Gmail already prevents all the time. It even seems like a great opportunity for Google to gather spam data in all sorts of languages.

kenjackson3• 15 years ago

Actually this is even more specific, which is building your product on a webservice provided by someone else is risky. Unlike a library you download, a webservice ends the day they cut access to it.

With a library you can continue to use it, and slowly rebuild your product to use a different library (or even use that library forever if it works for you), but with a web service it works 100% today and tomorrow it doesn't work at all.

chc2• 15 years ago

You mean like .NET? Or Cocoa Touch? Or DOM? Or Node? Or POSIX?

At some point, we're all relying on APIs provided by somebody else. I think that's why it's so easy for people to ignore the pitfalls of just a little bit more.

cookiecaper5• 15 years ago

The difference is that those APIs are "non-cloud". The code necessary to run those APIs is spread far and wide and no one can just centrally "turn off" .NET or POSIX. Perhaps over time the programs written for unmaintained APIs will fail on newer platforms, but you will always have the means to go back to the old system and run your dependent programs there. In Google's web-based system, Google is the only one with the keys necessary to keep that engine running, and if they take their ball and go home, all of that API's users are screwed.

eli2• 15 years ago

If Microsoft stopped all .NET support today, my .NET apps will still keep running. Big difference.

kevinpet• 15 years ago

In this case, people are using "API" to refer to the service. The google translate service is being shut down for non-human users.

tybris3• 15 years ago

There are billion dollar companies like NetFlix completely reliant on AWS APIs.

billswift• 15 years ago

I would be willing to bet that most of them have mitigation strategies in place that they can, at least in part, switch to. They don't use them because they are less cost effective than AWS (or other current providers) but they should be able to switch with relatively little notice.

DanI-S• 15 years ago

The original post mentions a 3-year deprecation period. Given the speed of technological progression, that would be pretty difficult for me to complain about.

Edit: The Translate API, specifically mentioned, will be deprecated December 2011. That's pretty soon.

thetrumanshow• 15 years ago

Google has made some unpopular developer-facing moves lately (App Engine pricing changes come to mind), and it seems entirely out-of-character.

From now on, any API announcement from Google should be accompanied with a GIANT expiration date stamped all over it by default. Then, if it keeps going... happy surprise!

rcfox• 15 years ago

That's silly. They wouldn't develop something with the plan of cancelling it.

kelnos• 15 years ago

Why not? Roll something out, and say you'll commit to providing it for a certain amount of time. If, after that time, it doesn't seem worth it to keep it going (by any metric you decide), pull it. You've given fair warning.

Of course, I imagine that sort of thing would hurt adoption quite a bit.

SriniK• 15 years ago

Google is doing the right thing that would be typical for an internet company. For any product they would need to have maintainers/owners who are continuously updating and monitoring. It is completely waste of time to maintain unused stuff.

alanh5• 15 years ago

You are making a false assumption. I personally use the FeedBurner API to keep track of feed subscribers, for example, and it was deprecated yesterday.

bane2• 15 years ago

I agree, something strange is definitely going on internally at Google.

I actually attribute it to starting with the shutdown of Wave and the floundering about with Buzz and other products since then.

One thing that Google has been excellent at doing is building up the perception that they have near limitless computing power at their disposal. These kinds of shutdowns, and the reasons given, are doing immense harm to that cultivated image.

rachelbythebay2• 15 years ago

Computing power, sure, but who's running it?

redler• 15 years ago

Google seems to be really good at starting projects and really bad at stopping them.

Gunther• 15 years ago

I would be very interested in seeing how many developers would pay for the Translate API if Google had decided to monetize it instead of deprecating it then shutting it down as some of the commentors on the blog had suggested. At the same time if the Google Translate API is such a popular service then maybe there is enough demand to support a startup providing a Translate API ;)

drndown2008• 15 years ago

I would pay for what I use which isn't a whole lot, but it will be hard to find a programmable replacement like the Translate API. It's also a little hard to believe that it was a "financial burden" for one of the richest corporations in the world.

frisco2• 15 years ago

  It's also a little hard to believe that it was
  a "financial burden" for one of the richest
  corporations in the world.

I think you underestimate the computational resources required here.

cschep• 15 years ago

I was thinking exactly this.. is this basically a list of already vetted startup ideas? There is clearly demand!

frisco2• 15 years ago

Starting a startup to replace Google Translate wouldn't be a simple proposition. Google's translation algorithms are considered best-of-breed and involve highly sophisticated statistical machine learning trained over a significant portion of their web crawl corpus data. Their staff scientists and engineers working on Translate are some of the best in the field, and the complexity here should not be underestimated. That said: yes, there's very obviously an opportunity here for the right team; but that opportunity is so big, its been there this entire time, even with the Google Translate API around.

juiceandjuice• 15 years ago

Right... Some problems are fine just throwing resources at them, some problems need experience and knowledge, and in my opinion, you're not going to get the intellectual capital you really need for something like this, especially with a lean startup, unless you are the intellectual capital.

bane2• 15 years ago

I wonder how much work it would be for Google to build a "Translation appliance" people could buy? I'd wager they'd do $100million in government sales alone the first year.

kingofspain• 15 years ago

I commented on a different story about the API changes (specifically Translate) and thought I'd been stupid to miss a big "DEPRECATED" message when I started out several months ago. Seems there was nothing to miss!

I (or more specifically, the client) would certainly pay for something like this. If anyone does have a replacement that is roughly as simple to use and isn't £1000/mo then you have a customer right now.

Klonoar2• 15 years ago

A startup that provides a Translate API... hmmm..

http://mygengo.com/services/api/

Works, no? It's human-based translation, though; a tad bit slower, but generally higher quality overall. ;)

Full Disclosure: I currently work with this company.

People should also definitely (at least) be aware of the Microsoft Translate APIs.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff512423.aspx

wccrawford• 15 years ago

You mean, why should you build a for-profit product while relying on someone else's not-for-profit API?

I'm guessing you shouldn't!

I've seen a lot of neat projects come from Google APIs, but that's as far as I'd taking it.

Relying on someone else's good will for the lifeblood of your company is insane.

1 exception, though: Getting started. I could see using Google to get off the ground and then switching to a more reliable API (read: paid for) afterwards.

tybris3• 15 years ago

I don't see the point of this whole release a free API, shut it down nonsense. I wouldn't mind paying for any of Google's APIs.

ChuckMcM2• 15 years ago

If you pay for an API, and it doesn't work, you can show economic harm and that gives you a basis to sue.

I know from experience that a number of Google's APIs are just some engineer's idea of how to hook into the data stored in the back end which Google puts out there for some easy (and free) goodwill but without any commitment ever to actually do the necessary foundational work to support it as a product (which they are really really bad at, in case you haven't noticed).

So the point is they use the API internally, exposing it gives them additional testing and additional feedback on how to make it better. Once the cost incurred by offering it for free exceeeds the benefits of the testing they pull it back. Continuing to use the now 'well tested and well rounded' API internally.

GOOG-411 was a great example of this. It was a great way to get voice samples from a lot of people by bartering a service. Once their voice training parameters weren't getting better they turn off the service, (cuts costs) but they still get the durable benefit of a well trained voice recognition library.

freshfunk2• 15 years ago

As a counterpoint, many companies are built off of APIs that are out there. That's the nature of business and that's actually great for the API authors out there.

But if developers knew that APIs could easily go away, then people wouldn't build businesses on top of those APIs. The risk would be too high.

I don't know the history but it seems that Google could've implemented some simple solutions to prevent abuse of their APIs while catering to the business community such as simply charging for use. Any legit business would be willing to do this.

lkozma• 15 years ago

I'm just guessing here but in this case it could be that the abuse doesn't mean extra traffic but people using it to generate text to fill pages with, in effect tricking the search engine.

tptacek• 15 years ago

That's not really a counterpoint, is it? The comment you're replying to advised people not to build for-profit enterprises off Google's free APIs. It didn't weasel an excuse for maybe just using the APIs anyways because it probably would work out in the long run; it said, rightly, "don't".

Guessing Google has bigger fish to fry than making the world nicer for people who want to build apps on translation APIs.

yalogin• 15 years ago

I completely agree that you are shooting yourself in the foot if you are relying on someone else's API for you entire functionality. But there are a few things here -

* Everything Google does is free. So it can be argued that the API is in fact for-profit. * In this case, translation is not something a small company can do by themselves. The API's whole value proposition is that it enables startups without the infrastructure like Google can create interesting applications using the API. Google wants people to do that and its very much a big part of its success so far.

So the developer is not entirely at fault.

I would not rely on that one API itself for my business but he/she chose to do it.

bad_user• 15 years ago

Google's App Engine is pretty much a for-profit API.

And now they've announced a change in their pricing scheme, which if true, would change App Engine from pay-what-you-use to same-as-amazon-aws-but-pricier scheme, which makes it hugely expensive for a large portion of devs that have built on top of App Engine. And migrating away from App Engine is a total pain in the ass.

I truly hope that the blog-post missed important details or that they'll keep providing the old option too (i.e. paying per cpu-hour instead of instance-hour).

I know App Engine was beta, but people have built on it expecting instability in the implementation, not in its pricing scheme. I mean, come on!

mcdaid• 15 years ago

See

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-appengine/ob-...

Clarifies that you will be paying per instance hour, instead of cpu.

Nothing is in concrete yet, if there is enough outrage amongst users maybe they will change their tune.

nhoj• 15 years ago

I never liked app engine. To me it seemed like you have to lock yourself into google as a vendor because your application has to be designed for app engine.

njharman• 15 years ago

> expecting instability in the implementation, not in its pricing scheme. I mean, come on!

Really, really? Come on, these very same concerns (pricing, it's beta) were/are brought up regularly. If you choose to ignore warnings/recommendations and use GAE that's your fault.

mike_esspe• 15 years ago

I somehow missed the new pricing model. It looks like my bill will skyrocket 2-3 times to over $2000/month. They explicitly tell, that old customers will be forced to move to a new pricing scheme. I wonder why there weren't a rage on HN front page about that?

I regret, that didn't choose AWS EC2 in the beginning.

alanh5• 15 years ago

While you are pointing out a valid strategic risk in building on another’s platform, I’m disappointed to see the top post here is simply engaging in blame-the-victim.

Kylekramer• 15 years ago

This isn't rape, it is a business. What is happening is not illegal or even unethical. Victim blaming is not wrong when the supposed victim is completely to blame.

ellyagg• 15 years ago

Right. And this same argument means you should not rely on, for example, gmail, for your email. This is good advice for people in general, although perhaps not something google wants to hear, as they generally market themselves as someone you can trust. Obviously, google will let you down in exactly the same way that, say, apple or microsoft or facebook will. The pain for some people might be greater in this case, simply because the expectations were higher. I often wonder if they regret adopting that "don't be evil" motto.

fragsworth• 15 years ago

No, the argument was that you shouldn't build a for-profit business that relies entirely on a good-will free API.

Even if you have a business with all of your employees on free gmail, you hardly rely on gmail, because you can probably switch to some other email system without going out of business.

Additionally, gmail is not even really a "good-will free" API. Advertisements more than make up for the costs.

nikcub4• 15 years ago

If Microsoft did this with the Windows API ten years ago people would be going absolutely batshit crazy in here and the government probably would have intervened

digitallogic• 15 years ago

They did a little shy of ten years ago with VB6. People did indeed go batshit, but the government did not get involved.

eli2• 15 years ago

Not sure I follow. Microsoft discontinues products too. I would imagine that anyone who based a company off supporting and integrating with Frontpage got screwed.

fjabre• 15 years ago

Relying on someone else's good will for the lifeblood of your company is insane

Tweetdeck anyone? And Zynga (FB is its lifeblood)

Google shutting down an API that thousands of developers are relying on without much warning is insane.

The web is an increasingly competitive space and there are lots of walled gardens to worry about. Google openly encourages developers to build on top of and use its APIs and it prides itself on its "Don't be evil" policy.

Like it or not, companies like Google, FB, and Apple are platforms that developers are building on top of simply because these companies and their services are the "web" these days.

jmathai3• 15 years ago

>> Tweetdeck anyone? And Zynga (FB is its lifeblood)

Exceptions are not the rule.

akkartik• 15 years ago

Google shutting down an API that thousands of developers are relying on without much warning is insane.

What constitutes 'much warning'? Translate API users have six months. Were you thinking of a different API?

People using the APIs knew the policies for deprecation in the ToS, I presume?

andylei• 15 years ago

it's not so black and white. it's not like you should never use anyone else's api ever for your for profit stuff; it's simply a question of risk versus benefit.

in the case of apis, the risk is that there is some probability that the api will go down. the benefit is that you don't have to write your own stuff, and in some cases, the benefit is the entire value proposition of your application. for example, should you use the google translate api? there is some probability that the api will go down. whatever you estimate this probability to be, that's how you have to weigh your benefit. you probably can't recreate google translate, so the benefit is whatever benefit your application provides, or the marginal benefit that google translate provides to your application.

also, consider the fact that all apis will go down, but you can always create value in the interim. no api is going to be around forever, but will html even be around forever? how long is your application going to be useful? maybe the chance that the api will go down in the medium term is low, so that's an acceptable lifetime for your application.

pasbesoin• 15 years ago

One needs to keep in mind that a significant portion of Google's public facing deployment consists of "throwing stuff against the wall, and seeing what sticks".

Remember the now legendary "beta" moniker. It applies, even where it's not explicitly designated.

I'm not defending Google. Just saying.

dstein2• 15 years ago

It's really too bad. The Translate API was super, super fun to play with. I made myself a cute little interface to translate JavaScript or CSV arrays into multiple languages simultaneously. I envisioned being able to build fully self-translating web applications. And there's no other company providing this type of technology in this fashion.

If there's any startup working in this area, here's your chance.

cookiecaper5• 15 years ago

Agreed. This is a great opportunity for a startup to swoop in, clone the Google API so the only change necessary is authentication tokens and URI, and get everyone to switch to their (paid) platform.

jan_g• 15 years ago

It's hard for a startup to "swoop in", because Google uses statistical analysis in it's translation software if I understand correctly various articles about this topic. This means that they have thousands of correctly translated documents from which the software learns. And (so they say) it gets better and better with time, because they feed it more and more documents in various languages. I'm sure I've overly simplified the Google's implementation and there's a lot more to it, but I'm trying to make a point :)

In short, it takes considerable amount of resources to make it work on a Google translate level.

jcampbell12• 15 years ago

Google cites abuse as the reason for shutting down the translate API. I find it ironic that they have engineers smart enough to write software that can translate human language between hundreds of language pairs, but can't write software to stop abuse.

I'll let Google in on a little secret: If you charge more for a service than it costs you to provide, then there is no such thing as abuse.

code_duck4• 15 years ago

Well, maybe not just that type of abuse, overusage without benefit to Google. Of course there could still be abuse of some sort, like somehow using a service to spread spam or malware.

BlazingFrog• 15 years ago

Somehow I doubt that's the abuse they are concerned about.

SoftwareMaven• 15 years ago

The cost in goodwill (and perhaps even real money) of using translate to fill hundreds/thousands of google ad-filled spam sites in hundreds of different languages may be much higher than they could ever conceivably recoup in charging for the API.

Once you charge more than any legitimate user would be willing to pay for the API, you are effectively shutting down the API anyway.

cookiecaper5• 15 years ago

Are spammers going to be willing to pay x cents/call just to fill spam pages with translations? We must make x high enough that spammers will not make enough profit to justify the expense but legitimate businesses that depend on the API will still be able to pay for it.

Spam is all about maximum distribution and massiveness, so I don't think the pricing would have to be very high to take the profitability out of the spam operations.

krisrak2• 15 years ago

Never rely on anyones API, building something with API is mashup/side-project not a startup/company.

mindcrime• 15 years ago

Never rely on anyones API, building something with API is mashup/side-project not a startup/company.

I think a better statement is "Never rely on anyone's API unless you have a contractual agreement and SLA in place, and a backup plan for if/when the API goes away; building something on an API otherwise is a mashup/side-project not a startup/company."

code_duck4• 15 years ago

Pretty sure that's not what TweetDeck is thinking this week.

kenjackson3• 15 years ago

But it's probably what all the other Twitter clients are thinking. :-)

gte910h• 15 years ago

All business is risk. This is yet one more risk. Hundreds if not thousands of successful businesses work on top of other businesses.

drcube• 15 years ago

Also, you shouldn't ever write a program with dependencies. :P

neovive• 15 years ago

The announcements seem impact the smaller, niche, API's. It's unlikely that this would ever happen to large API's such as Maps, Analytics, etc. However, the Translate API was definitely very cool.

taken11• 15 years ago

it happened for the search api

orblivion2• 15 years ago

Google shuts down several of countless, FREE APIs, on which the foundations of many startups rest.

"Google is just another company who doesn't care about developers."

What? A little gratitude, at least, before suggesting how things could be better.

chc2• 15 years ago

Gratitude for what? Ripping out "the foundations of many startups"? In many cases, offering something and then rescinding at the last minute is worse than not offering in the first place.

(I'm not personally mad and wouldn't have built a business around this API. But creating false expectations is not a good thing.)

orblivion2• 15 years ago

That's reasonable, but I think it's sortof unclassy to ignore the fact that they "cared" (as much as a company can really care) enough to offer it in the first place, and everything else they still offer.

On the other hand I'm having mixed feelings now, trying to reconcile this with the way I feel about how Facebook's privacy policy affects users. I just don't get the impression that Google is careless the same way.

r00fus• 15 years ago

The problem is not that google is shutting down some of it's free APIs.

Many folks are crying out for a paid version of the Translate API for example.

I question the motive behind shuttering a useful and unparalleled API like translate without considering putting a pricetag on it.

michaelpinto2• 15 years ago

Question: Can anyone recommend another Translation API? The problem is that the translation work that Google does is the best out there that I've seen, and I'm not even sure if there's a decent alternative to be found.

alienreborn• 15 years ago

http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/

Klonoar2• 15 years ago

Full disclosure: I currently work with the company detailed below (myGengo).

Depending on your needs, you could consider human based translation, which is generally more accurate than machine-based translation. Over at myGengo (http://mygengo.com/) we offer an API to help people get translations done by an actual translator, as opposed to a machine (think Mechanical Turk, but focused on translation). Feel free to check it out - various libraries abound:

http://mygengo.com/services/api/

An advantage to going with this approach is that the myGengo API can also return a machine translation while a job is being worked on; a takeaway here is that even if a service like Google shuts down, it should be fairly simple to use another service behind the scenes, keeping a nice level of transparency for you.

Of course, if you'd like to stick with general machine translations, you could check out the following - should be close enough:

http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/

michaelpinto2• 15 years ago

thank you!

mromaine• 15 years ago

Full disclosure: I'm the CTO of myGengo

I would also add that because translation is core to our business, we would never deprecate the translation API :)

jsdalton2• 15 years ago

I don't mean to be a stickler, but this is an egregious example of editorializing in the title. Can someone edit it please?

I was already well aware of the API deprecation story, but I clicked on this link thinking it was a new article from Google defending the move (or something of the sort).

corin_• 15 years ago

This submission is linking to a comment, not a news story, and that comment asks "why should any developer, any company which wants to build a valuable product for the long term use any of your APIs ever again?"

So, still slightly editorialised title here on HN, but pretty much on the money.

jsdalton2• 15 years ago

I totally missed that. Thank you for clarifying.

dkarl• 15 years ago

The post itself presents an opinion, not a news item, and the title reflects the content of the post.

tomkarlo2• 15 years ago

Offering an API, paid or unpaid, is not making an unending commitment to support it forever. If it was, businesses would simply not offer APIs.

When someone offers a product or service, they have to right to decide later on to not offer that service any more. That is simply the nature of any business arrangement where you are depending on an entity not under your control.

Would the OP prefer that Google and other companies simply not offer APIs?

dhimes2• 15 years ago

Nobody is arguing that they don't have the right, but there are social implications to doing so. People have the right to not like them because of it.

You also have the right to not write thank-you cards when people do nice things for you, but those people have the right to react to your selfishness.

tomkarlo2• 15 years ago

I can understand being unhappy because they've decided to deprecate a free API. I disagree with the rage of the OP.

This was a free service and they're no longer going to offer it, and they're shutting it down in an orderly manner. That's not selfish.

This is more like someone giving you a birthday present every year, and then when they fail to send you one, you write a nasty post about how greedy and selfish they are.

ankimal• 15 years ago

Dint Fred Wilson say this at Disrupt NY last week: http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bit...

They should charge for it at the very least. Whats stopping anyone from using a proxy service and hitting their web page? I m sure people would rather pay a little than go through these unnecessarily complicated and unethical practices.

nekitamo• 15 years ago

Glad I stuck to scraping Google Translate, and not using the API. Cheaper and a better long-term solution.

dstein2• 15 years ago

What did you use instead?

akanet• 15 years ago

He said he scrapes the HTML output of the actual Google Translate web pages.

nhebb• 15 years ago

The way I look at it, Apple and Microsoft have ecosystems that allow others to profit from software development. Google has an ecosystem that allows others to profit from advertising. Of course, you can development software products around Google's platforms, but I'm only seeing a handful of success stories in comparison to the other two.

anorwell• 15 years ago

How frustrating. I built something just last week using the translate, transliterate, and diacritize APIs. These are/were really useful APIs for creating language tools.

jdvolz• 15 years ago

I'm leery of building anything on top of someone else's API. I built on top of an API while also keeping in active contact with the company to let them know what I was doing, going as far as talking directly to their legal department, and they still shut me down when they couldn't handle the volume of usage. And this is in a situation where every marginal use of their API made them money. Collectively I was going to make them revenue of (projected admittedly) $1.2M. Didn't stop them from shutting me down.

Long story short: Building on someone else's API is a recipe for disaster. Are there times when you have to? Sure. But you need to know what you are getting into.

ojilles• 15 years ago

FTA: "... so you decided to "das kind mit dem bade ausschuetten" (translate it) ?"

Classic :-)

baconner• 15 years ago

Amazing sense of entitlement in this comment. Google built the apis, they host the apis, they incur costs from this yet provide them for free. Presumably this is because they intend to get some benefit. So its Google's decision if they want to continue to provide them or change the way they work.

I use some free apis in my commercial apps but I'm aware that I don't control them nor am I entitled to them. They may change in such a way that I'd have to discontinue a product but that's a responsibility I took on when I decided to use them. Google and other free API providers don't bear reposibility for my decision.

pettazz• 15 years ago

Came here to say this. This guy is complaining because Google is shutting down a service that started to become more of a burden on them to provide than a benefit to the actual developers using it. They're not the goddamned Red Cross, they're a business. A very cool, developer-friendly business, yes, but still.

alanh5• 15 years ago

Given they are deprecating the FeedBurner APIs, is there a good alternative to FeedBurner at this point?

magicalist• 15 years ago

I keep hearing about hypothetical for-profit products and people's weekend hobby projects being affected by this change, but does anyone have any example of an actual business that will be affected by this change?

Note that most of these APIs have 3 year deprecation policies and so will continue to be around; only the translate api is going away (and that's in December).

I have serious doubts that almost anyone would actually pay per translate (and if you would, it's likely you could work out a license deal independent of a public API anyway). It seems like the reaction to this has more to do with annoyance that another cool free service is going away and remaining anger over app engine pricing changes.

jcampbell12• 15 years ago

Yes. I hire many translators. We use google translate, and license professional dictionaries to speedup the process. I estimate that Google translate saves us $20k/year. I personally would be willing to pay a lot for continued access to the translate API. (I'll probably just end up using some sort of iframe hackery when the translate API goes away)

The actual business is http://www.yabla.com/

xpaulbettsx• 15 years ago

Check out http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/ - I find the translations aren't always as good with idiomatic phrases, but it does a pretty good job and the API is complete and easy to use.

dirtyaura• 15 years ago

Yabla seems very interesting. Care to share more details? How is it doing, who and where from are the largest user groups, how did you end up with the idea, etc.

jonnycat• 15 years ago

We use Google Translate where I work for a some very small customer service related tasks. Our business is not "built on" Google Translate (and has nothing to do with translation), but it solves some small problems for us and is easily worth $10-20 a month for a low volume of requests. Actually, since we already have it integrated and are happy with it, we'd probably pay more just to have the problems solved so we can focus on really important things.

rbranson• 15 years ago

If they feel as if they can only launch APIs that have indefinite lifetimes, this will seriously hamper their ability to justify building new public APIs. Deprecation is a risk taken anytime software is built on an API, for-profit or not. This is why software should be characterized as "living" and not a static entity.

modernerd• 15 years ago

Sad to see the Translate API go. Will be interesting to see if crowdsourced translation engines such as http://duolingo.com/ will one day come to fill Google Translate's shoes.

krisrak2• 15 years ago

Fred Wilson said it the best at TechCrunch Disrupt, - "Don't be a Twitter bitch, Google bitch or facebook bitch. Be your own bitch"

smackfu• 15 years ago

Are these APIs really so unique that they can't code for some other provider's replacement? Is it just that a for-pay translation API, for instance, is too expensive for a product without a solid business plan to use?

AashayDesai• 15 years ago

And what of open-source projects that rely on such APIs? Are they expected to figure out a way to switch to for-pay APIs as well? Example: https://github.com/Marak/translate.js

rachelbythebay2• 15 years ago

There are two kinds of APIs: the ones which are deprecated and the ones which don't exist or work yet.

frytaz• 15 years ago

booo! where's api replacement ?

whtswthelogin• 15 years ago

Google admits it doesn't know sh!t about running a stable business.

Thanks Google! Ya dumb fvcks.

toddh2• 15 years ago

My guess is Google setup these APIs to help train their learning algorithms. Now that they are trained there's no reason to keep up the service anymore. Maybe the key is to stay away from APIs that do work and don't contribute to revenue?

rryan3• 15 years ago

For e.g. the translate API, how could they train their algorithms? There is no feedback associated with it (that I know of).

chris-hexx• 15 years ago

Static analysis of lots of human translators' output. Given the input and output of a strange human filter, they're trying to approximate the filter using machine learning. When their algorithm's output approximates the best translations, they're done.

toddh2• 15 years ago

GOOG-411 is an example of this process. Google got voice samples and users got a service. When the voice training parameters stopped getting better the service was shut off.

senthilnayagam• 15 years ago

Google aura is gone, without free let us see how it competes with apple, micrsoft

invisible• 15 years ago

Solution that they chose not to use: API keys. Really messed up of them to jump to completely shutting down without giving some sort of rate limit/access control.

lalmalang• 15 years ago

Far more likely than 'abuse' (they could have just charged afterall) is probably Google's realization that they have an uncontested lead in machine translation - and there is a lot of money to be made here.. They recently won a contract with the European patent office to machine translate patents for them...

johnx123• 15 years ago

Why this FUD? Let's scrap or sniff Google tools as before!

iqster• 15 years ago

Quote from Fred Wilson at TC Disrupt NY:

Don’t be a Google Bitch, don’t be a Facebook Bitch, and don’t be a Twitter Bitch. Be your own Bitch. (link: http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bit...)

adulau• 15 years ago

Some of the Google API are released early to get contributions, testers and inputs to improve their services. In other words, they abuse their contributors to improve their services without thanking them or helping them on the long-term. The translation service is one of them, the massive improvement of the translation service came from the many inputs received by people using their API.

It shows again the importance of building free software along with their free network services. That's quite challenging and difficult but it shows that initiative like http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/ is not completely useless on the long run.

hessenwolf• 15 years ago

Hotmail deleted my account after 28 days and i lost contact with all the people i met in my year of travelling.

Yahoo killed their spell checking api in april and now i need a new word splitter. Any ideas?

mmccomb• 15 years ago

Pruning old APIs wouldn't put me off. What puts me off is the inter-dependencies between APIs. Want to use Google Prediction API? Well you'll need a Google Storage API account for that. Oh and, you can only have one of those for free. And just in case, they'll take your billing info.

I was psyched to start playing around with the prediction API but just got totally put off by the new API pricing/management. I'd argue that the restrictions are now so tight and cumbersome that there's no real sandbox environment to encourage devs to try out the services. I'm a touch disappointed.

latj• 15 years ago

Google was ok giving you a connection to translate because you were helping them build up the system. Now the most powerful database of human language is going to be locked up. We should all learn a lesson from this...

rryan3• 15 years ago

How does using the translate API help Google? They already have the largest source of natural language text in existence (the web) -- why would they need your translation queries?

pnathan2• 15 years ago

Why should anyone build a business on an API that there isn't a contract in place to require uptime, with appropriate fiscal penalties for downtime?

sharjeel• 15 years ago

Facebook made exactly the same mistake and I believe it is hurting their platform a lot even though they've opened new doors to support new ideas for their evolved API.

I launched an app back in May 2007 right after their platform launch. After the four years the app is quite broken now and every now and then a user sends me a message about it. Today I decided to spend a day to translate all those "old" API calls into "new & improvides" API calls but due to lack of documentation, unavailability of search results due to all that legacy documentation better SEO'ed and the hectic task of re-testing all the workflows I've previously tested thoroughly, I gave up!

Why should I put in so much effort in re-writing my code just because you don't like a function name or you think same functionality could be achieved by another one so this should be dropped?

Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?

Related Stories