Rand Fishkin makes an excellent post on his blog about why search engines should offer APIs for all SEOs to be able to pull search results without scraping. He argues people are doing it anyway and opening complete, accurate APIs could reduce the incidence.
Certainly exposing this data gives SEOs a head start. It would make it trivial to detect who is the #1 site in a field, ripping apart all the variables in that site and by running a comparison getting significant clues towards improving your rankings.
From a search engine’s point of view I personally wouldn’t expose search APIs. Unlike eBay the search engines don’t benefit from allowing people to use their search results platform without visiting it.
I think Rand’s post was really awesome and his blog is fantastic. If you are into SEO you should definitely read it.
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