Google Web APIs - an Instrument for Webometric Analyses?

Introduction The analysis of the Internet and its applications touches upon varied fields of research such as information science, computer science, economics, and psychology. One reason for the growing scientific interest in the Internet is the already high and still growing amount of web users, applications, contents, and web servers worldwide. Despite a variety of different search engines, there is no doubt about the predominance of Google search engine technology today. Among the factors that have added decisively to Google’s success are that over a long period of time, Google has offered the largest index, innovative new services and highly optimized performance and usability. This poster introduces Google Web APIs (Google APIs) as an instrument and playground for webometric studies. Several examples of Google APIs implementations are given. Our examples show that this Google Web Service can be used successfully for informetric Internet based studies albeit with some restrictions. For instance, we can show that hit results from the two different Google interfaces: Google APIs and the standard interface Google.com (Google Standard) vary in range, structure und availability. Our poster demonstrates first results of our research with Google APIs, gives implementation examples and makes possibilities and restrictions of the Google APIs clearer.