EvilAPI

As Don Box says, you have to love the web. Don says

Within a couple of days of Google announcing the move from web services to Javascript libraries for search, someone has already written a wire-compatible version of the old SOAP API that is implemented in terms of screen scraping the result of making a LoREST/HTML call against the public Google site.

For those who don’t know, screenscraping is a technique in which a computer program extracts text data from the display output of another program. In other words, your application requests the HTML from a Google search and you transform it into a SOAP message. That’s exactly what has been done, and that in about 3 or 4 days or so! Again, you have to love the web.

http://evilapi.com/

If you’ve missed out on everything, Google had a soap service that you could access to get results from a search. The service is still alive, but support is discontinued. They now offer an Ajax search API. This has been the reason for a lot of debate on the internet.