Google discontinued their SOAP based search api recently, and bloggers have been going nuts. It's getting a bit old. In Google Maps API team says: Stop It! the author laments that Google is imposes 50k requests to their geocoding service and acts as if it is a sign of the apocalypse! First Google kills their search API, now they are limiting us! The man is keeping us down!
As someone who used Google's SOAP based search api in several projects I can assure you that it needed: either to be killed or to be resurrected. There are many reasons why it is good to have the API available, but no has admitted that it sucked. It was neglected. It returned Bad Gateway almost as often as it returned search results. It was a true case of bit rot. The person who created it is no longer interested or able to care for it and hasn't for years.
As for the "evilness" of rate limiting their geocoding service, a quick comparison to "the king of web services", Amazon's ECS whose rate limit is very similar (ecs is the api which lets you get pricing/availability/... of products, not to be confused with EC2 which is their on the fly processing power.) Given that Amazon expects to make money as a result of those queries and Google doesn't, Google's once every 1.73 seconds compared to Amazon's once every second seems very reasonable
(yeah yeah, the devils in the details - Amazon's is once every second per IP, if you are going to have a cluster of machines each requiring geocoding, why not set up your own internal geocoding service...)
