Google’s AJAX Search API Hits 1.0

Looking to include a slick AJAX search tool into your own site? You may need to look no further than Google .

The search giant today rolled out version 1.0 beta of the Google AJAX Search API. The API  had been at the experimental version 0.1 for the past three months.

Google Product Manager Tom Stocky told internetnews.com that the 1.0 beta release means that the Google AJAX Search API is nearly ready for prime time.

Stocky was unable to provide stats in the number of users for the 0.1 version of the API, but he did note that the community of users was “vibrant” and that they had found some innovative uses for the API.

Stocky explained that the primary use of the Google AJAX Search API is as a standard search control.

“So with about 10 lines of JavaScript and HTML you can put an AJAX search box on your site,” Stocky said. “It gives you access to Web search results, blog, video and, with version 1.0, news results as well.”

Froogle and Google Base results are not currently part of the results returned by the API. But in addition to including Google News results, Google Maps results are now available Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

The 1.0 API also may used in intranet settings, for enterprises that want to use the API for search over their internal documents.

Google’s AdSense ads will now appear alongside the Web search results from the AJAX API.

Because the effort is still a bit of an experiment, Stocky said advertisers will not be charged for clicks.

“With just those 10 lines you can get the results in line so you don’t have to go to a separate page of hosted results,” Stocky added.

“You can get up to 8 results for any query. The idea is to make it really easy to put this dynamic search box on a site.”

The fact that Google is providing the search results as JavaScript  also enables developers to build applications on top of the API for broader uses or API mashups.

Google has a few goals for the AJAX Search API, both tangible and intangible.

“We’re tying to satisfy some really direct needs,” Stocky noted. “People who have blogs want to have a good site search that just searches their blog and they want to have it be done in a way that doesn’t take people to a separate page.”

On the other side of the equation, Stocky noted that simply seeing what users will do with the API is one of the goals.

“It’s not clear exactly what people are going to be doing with this API,” Stocky said.

“In a sense the reason why we created the API is so that people could come up with applications that we haven’t even thought of ourselves.”