Anil Dash brings up an interesting point regarding Google’s purchase of Pyra Labs, the publishers of the Blogger/Blog*Spot weblogging software and service: many blogs running software other than Blogger use the Google Web APIs to provide inter- and intra-site search capabilities. (This blog is run on the Movable Type web-logging software. Other blogging software packages include Radio and Blosxom.)
The Terms of Service for the Google Web APIs includes this statement: “And you may not use the search results provided by the Google Web APIs service with an existing product or service that competes with products or services offered by Google.”
This part of the agreement takes on some new meaning since Google’s acquisition of both blogging software and services. While Google has, up until now, been a benevolent presence on the web, there is nothing to guarantee that this will continue to be the case. The Web APIs are currently offered at no charge, but it is conceivable that this situation could change as Google seeks to enhance and differentiate its blogging package; a future version of Blogger could have the WebAPIs built in, while a fee could be charged to users of other software.
Once you start looking at this clause in the licesnsing agreement, it is easy to see how it could be applied in other restrictive manners. Google now provides a news service, so this clause could potentially be used to prevent a news site from providing related links generated by the Google Web APIs. (One caveat to my caveats: the Web APIs licensing agreement restricts the usage to personal, non-commercial purposes, so a commercial news site should not be using this software for this purpose anyway.)
Google Answers is a service for finding paid help from researchers with expertise in the Google system and with certain types of subject matter. This is very similar to the service which public and institutional librarians often provide for free. The Answers service has not been as successful as Google may have hoped, but it could be used by some less-beneficent Google management in the future to prevent library blogs from using Google Web APIs results to assist their clients.
With the large range of services and tools Google provides, it is easy to come up with other potential conflicts between bloggers and the search behemoth. I’m not sure that this will be the case, but many of us had our warm and fuzzy feelings about eBay shattered last week when we found out about their over-eagerness to turn our personal information over to practically anyone who asks for it.