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Rise of The API's

How APIs Are Changing Search Forever?
 When was the last time you used a search engine to find information? 

Some of us depend heavily on Search Engines, but did you know that a huge chunk of searchers are shifting to using APIs instead of search engines and they are liking it so much that they would not mind if the entire search infrastructure shifted from normal search to an API based system. 

So, what are APIs?

APIs have been around for quite some time now and programmers have been using them to meet all sorts of development targets. There are some great advantages of using APIs, particularly those that are publicly available. The best thing about application programming interfaces is 're-usability'. The same API can be used over and over again to achieve different results and its use lowers the programming burden significantly. 

There is much more to APIs that just this to merit its own article, thus, we will leave the 'what' part right here and move on to 'how'. 

How are people using APIs?

There are two types of people as far as this topic is concerned: the user people and the developer people!

As an user, all the apps that you have on your iOS, Blackberry or Android device are all based on some API. When you use an app on the mobile device to find a restaurant, book a movie ticket or find a flight, you are actually using an API that the programmer smartly added to his chunk of codes.

These are actually big chunks of programming codes that developers use to make their applications more useful. Among the most common of publicly available APIs are Google Maps, Facebook, Google Search, Amazon eCommerce and Twitter. There are thousands others that are used in several applications in a variety of ways.

So, simply put, developers are using APIs to make their applications better and users are using them  behind their apps to simply their lives. They don't have to look for the nearest computer to find something they need because their mobile phones have become powerful, thanks to APIs.

Now, for the most important impact of application programming interfaces on search!

How Search is Changing?

Search is changing dramatically. Now app based searches are almost putting search engines out of the way. So, unless the search is conducted from the search engine page, there is no way in hell that PPCs will work! No search engines, no PPC. So, as a business who spends a lot on PPC wil have to rethink their strategy is the majority of search gets conducted through APIs and apps.

In some cases, as with Apple's Siri, search engines are not used unless Siri does not know the answer to the query. For instance, if you ask the app to look for a hotel in New York, chances are high that Siri will fetch the data from TripAdvisor or Yelp instead of looking for it on Google! So, no matter how much you spend on organic SEO, it would be of no use if you are big on TripAdvisor, Zagat and the big review websites!

Talking about social media optimization, if there are no search engines in between, there is no place for social media optimization to exist either! Social signals are used to bump search results higher on the SERP, not for anything else, so you might want to sit down with a good social media optimizer and talk about what is happening with application searches. 

So, Is Everything Over? Is This Search Apocalypse?


Hold on to your knickers, because the only thing that is permanent in this universe is - change! You should always be ready for change. The end of traditional search is not nearing its end, but things are about to change for real. Now the importance of context is greater than ever and we are going to see an ever increasing number of users using applications far more than traditional search.


Nobody is very sure about this yet and we are not saying that you should be investing on creating custom APIs right away, but this is something all businesses need to start thinking about in the near future.









This post first appeared on Latest In Social Media Marketing, Reputation Management And Local SEO, please read the originial post: here

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Rise of The API's

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