Google SOAP Search API - limited future?

Hi,

Readers who have become fond of tools like bootcat to build new corpora
from the web may be interested to know that Google has begun limiting
its service.

In order for you to use the Google service from 3rd party tools, you
needed to obtain a unique key. Google announced today that they are to
stop issuing any more keys for new users. According to the Google Code
Blog, those with a key can still use the service as usual (and still
perform a maximum of 1000 queries per day) and there are no plans to
turn off the service completely, although I have a feeling that decision
will be reviewed in the not-too-distant future.

I'm sure there are many other corpora-based researchers who use the
Google API for many interesting tasks other than corpus compilation, so
I think it's a shame that this has happened.

http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2006/12/beyond-soap-search-api.html

On the plus side, Yahoo has a similar service.

Regards,
Andy