Fall Housekeeping

When we introduced this blog over four years ago, the term AJAX was only a year old, and Google had exactly one relevant API . Ajax has since become a mainstream part of the Web, and our family of APIs has grown. Like many growing families, we’ve accumulated a lot of cruft over the years, and have outgrown our first home. Time for some housekeeping.

API Documentation - Now easier to find and use
We’ve reorganized our documentation to make it easier to find what you’re looking for, based on what you want to do. We used to group our APIs based on technology - for instance, there were Google Data APIs and AJAX APIs. Now, you’ll see that each API has been given its own place, including its own documentation pages. This new documentation has been created from the ground up to provide a better experience for people coding against the APIs. We’ve also organized these more logically by product, such as moving the Book Search API into the Books family of APIs, and added many more samples to help you get started.

A fond farewell
In the spirit of consolidation, we’ll be retiring this blog in favor of the Google Code Blog. By concentrating on fewer blogs, we’ll be able to keep the blog fresher and help make sure that as wide an audience as possible is able to benefit from our posts. We’ll continue using tags, so that you can subscribe to your favorite APIs and focus on the content that most interests you (though we hope you’ll check in occasionally to see what new stuff you might be missing).

Show your support for the Code blog by hopping over to read about the new Google APIs console and Custom Search API, and also say good-bye to the Web and Local Search APIs, which are being deprecated. Full post here.

Posted by: Adam Feldman, Product Manager

Local Search for Sweden and Denmark Launched

Google Maps added local search support for Sweden and Denmark last month and we couldn't wait to get it into the Google AJAX Search API. You can now search for businesses in Sweden and Denmark through your local search-based mashup without making any additional code changes.

Go ahead and try "hilton near stockholm" or "sushi near copenhagen" here and see what results you get.

Ali Pasha, Google AJAX API team

Local Search for the United Kingdom Launched

We just launched local search for the UK this morning. For users already using the AJAX Search API for local search, you should now be able to search for businesses in the United Kingdom without having to make any changes to your code. Go ahead and now try "Starbucks near London" in your App that uses the Google AJAX Search API. You should get something like the following:

If you want to add local search to your web site, take a look at the AJAX Search API documentation. The samples here are also particularly useful.

For existing Maps API users, adding local search is easy, as shown in the previous post. Note, like all other existing applications using Google's local search, the new search control will also have UK local search automatically enabled.

If you have any feedback or comments, I look forward to reading them on the developer forum.

Ali Pasha, Google AJAX API team