New Shopping APIs and Deprecation of the Base API

Friday, December 17, 2010 | 9:30 AM

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We are pleased to announce our newest addition to the shopping family -- simple yet powerful programmatic interfaces that enable retailers to upload their content to and query data from Google. The new Shopping Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have two main components: Content and Search. As part of this launch, we’re are also sunsetting the Base API and replacing it with these new Shopping APIs.

Content API for Shopping
Thousands of retailers upload product data to Google for use on multiple destinations like Google Product Search, Product Ads, Google Affiliate Network, Google Commerce Search, and shopping rich snippets. Our new Content API makes it easier and faster to upload this product data to Google. Retailers can use the Content API to upload their data and make incremental updates to frequently changing attributes like price and availability. Marketplaces and Aggregators can also use the new Content API to manage multiple client accounts. The Content API is immediately available and you can learn more about it here.

Search API for Shopping
We are also announcing a new Search API that makes it easy for our Google Commerce Search customers, Google Affiliate Network publishers and developers to build innovative applications using product data. The Search API simplifies access to product data and is optimized to deliver the most relevant product results. To get started with the Search API, you can sign in to the API console.

Shopping APIs Replace Base API
These new Shopping APIs replace the existing Google Base Data API for our content providers & search applications. We are deprecating the Base API and will fully decommission it on June 1, 2011. Developers using the Base API for shopping data should migrate to the new Shopping APIs for uploading their content and using data for search applications. There are a few non-shopping data types that won’t be supported with new Shopping APIs, such as jobs, real estate, events, and activities. We hope this won’t cause too much disruption, and we recommend developers use Google Site Search and other search technologies for those use cases. You can read a more detailed FAQ on Google Base Data API Deprecation here.