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There have been a few calls lately to clone the Google Search API. I don't think this is a good idea - the world has moved on since the Google API was specified in 2002, and using SOAP for this kind of thing no longer looks like the good idea it seemed then.

As someone who does a lot of work with search APIs (writing them my day job and consuming them in my Argos search engine API) I'd much prefer to see Google support the OpenSearch API.

However, there is an additional problem beyond standardising the request-response API: there is no standard query language (ignoring CQL for the moment, as no one uses it) and I don't think there is much of a prospect for that to change for a while.