When we introduced this blog over four years ago, the term AJAX was only a year old, and Google had exactly one relevant API . Ajax has since become a mainstream part of the Web, and our family of APIs has grown. Like many growing families, we've accumulated a lot of cruft over the years, and have outgrown our first home. Time for some housekeeping.

One of Google's most popular APIs is our Feed API . This API is found all over the web, making any feed content available for developers to embed on their sites. A problem with embedding content in this manner is that there's no good way to make sure that your visitors see the freshest data, regardless of how long they stay on your page. Of course, you could try polling )also known as the "are we there yet?" method(,

Last year we introduced Rich Snippets in Custom Search , allowing you to define your own custom attributes that we'll index and return with your custom search results. A few months later we showed you how to render some of these rich snippets in your Custom Search element . Sure, this was a powerful way to let your visitors see thumbnails or interact with the results via actions . But we felt it was still too constrained.