Dave Winer is asking for community support to rally Microsoft and/or Yahoo (or any major search engine player) to clone the Google API and remove the limits imposed by Google (i.e., no commercial use of their API and limited number of queries, among others).

Why clone the Google API and not create your own and then open that up without limits? Is Google's API that much better? No - but it's out there, and has been for 3 years now. By using the same API, developers can plug in any search engine they want - and then each company competes based on quality and not because they've locked you in.

I'm all for it! I don't do much in the search game (other than use it every day), but this would do exactly what Dave's saying - allow Microsoft and/or Yahoo to leap-frog Google in the search space. Competition is good! Remember how stagnant browsers were for a few years when Netscape was down (before Firefox)? Well, that's where we're at in search. Except Google's on top.

Time for that to change!

Technorati Tags: clonethegoogleapi