As of late, Google API has been my new “thing” to explore as a part of the development we are doing for SearchDirectoryOf.

Have to admit, some pretty cool things can be done — all you need to know is a decent amount of (and is some cases, very little) XML, Ajax, Jquery and depending on what you want to do, formats such as KML.

Now, we are not just talking maps here, or even custom search engines… but great tools for working with mash up feeds, doing some really cool stuff based of geocoding, google friends, reporting applications, and the up and coming Google’s twitter like engine.

Here is the base site for the Google API:

http://code.google.com/

For example, a straight-forward yet effective example that I have been working on (and still evolving) can be seen here:

www.searchdirectoryof.com

On the home page we are featuring only the Directory websites that are apart of our network.

There are a lot more on our list, but what is seen here are the Directories that are ready to be promoted. If you click on the red markers, you will see a custom bubble that offers information about the directory and a link to the home page.

This was done by using the Google Map API and a KML file. Basically the city of the directory was mapped by using the longitude and latitude which was collected in a Google Spreadsheet. Then, a template of the bubble was created and that information also stored in the same  Google Spreadsheet.  The spreadsheet then provided a KML link, in which you supply to Google Earth — and whadda ya get? A custom google map!

Read a detailed tutorial on how to do it here: http://earth.google.com/outreach/tutorial_spreadsheet.html

The site also uses the Google Ajax Feed API, to display various feeds.

Basically, all I have done in the above example  is used Yahoo Pipes to mash up several of the directory feeds into one and our main hub of twitter feeds, then pulled those through the Google Ajax feeder.  Read more on how to build your own here: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxfeeds/

And finally, the Google Search API. No, we are not talking about adding a regular “search feature” to a site, but building a search engine that indexes an array of specific websites, and highlighting those sites based off keywords.

The Search API is here: http://www.google.com/coop/docs/cse/

The process is pretty easy, all you need to do is first create the search engine and provide the “sites’ that you want to index. Then, you can set up refinements and promotions that will promote a particular site to the top of the search results based off keywords. You can also create refinements: Google Refinements.

You can download the XML file of your Search engine and by following the developer guide, do some extensive customization with queries and specs.

I suspect I will explore a lot more of the newer API tools that are coming out, as well as digging deeper into what they already have available. So with that said… stay tuned.