Google Decides to Put a Stop on Unofficial Autocomplete API on August 10

Unauthorized access to autocomplete API is going to be stopped by Google starting from August 10, 2015. The reason behind this announcement is that Google wants to keep the users’ experience of autocomplete API the same as it was intended to be used, i.e., Autocomplete API – closely linked to Search.

Or as Google puts it:

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“We built autocomplete as a complement to Search, and never intended that it would exist disconnected from the purpose of anticipating user search queries. Over time we’ve realized that while we can conceive of uses for an autocomplete data feed outside of search results that may be valuable, overall the content of our automatic completions are optimized and intended to be used in conjunction with web search results, and outside of the context of a web search don’t provide a meaningful user benefit.

In the interest of maintaining the integrity of autocomplete as part of Search, we will be restricting unauthorized access to the unpublished autocomplete API as of August 10th, 2015. We want to ensure that users experience autocomplete as it was designed to be used — as a service closely tied to Search. We believe this provides the best user experience for both services.”

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Google’s Autocomplete service is able to predict a user’s query before finishing typing. But, there are many developers who used a non-official or non-published API to get the sort of words people are searching for most often and integrated such search results within their own services like SEM and keyword tools. Thus, it seems that Google wants to overcome this tempting situation by putting a stop on such unofficial and autocomplete API. And also want to make it clear that its APIs are for it to control. This may impact on numerous SEM and keyword searching tools that utilized this API to build new watchword thoughts. For example, Keyword Tool, Ubersuggest, Yoast and Google Keyword Suggest Tool.

As per Google Webmaster’s Central Blog Says:

[mk_blockquote style=”quote-style” font_family=”none” text_size=”12″ align=”left”]“However, there are some times when using an unsupported, unpublished API also carries the risk that the API will stop being be available. This is one of those situations.”[/mk_blockquote]

So, it seems that if you live by using unofficial APIs for your SEM or keyword searching services, you die by them too.