Some observations on using the search APIs for the 3 major search engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo. By far the best I've found is Bing, followed by Yahoo, and lastly Google.
To perform a search for Ireland:
For Bing and Yahoo you need to sign up for an API key. It only takes 2 minutes. Google doesnt need an API key. All can return JSON formatted search results (also XML), however each has a proprietary format. All search engines have removed limits on the number of queries you can submit. Bing and Yahoo dont place limits on the number of results that can be returned from a single query, however Google limits you to 64 results for a general search (other searches are more limited). The 'rsz' parameter for Google can be small (4 results) or large (8 results). To retrieve more results for all you can apply an offset, which is the last parameter for each. Overall the search APIs have improved massively over the past year. All thats really missing is a unified search syntax and result set.
