If you haven't looked at google's APIs lately, they have a *lot* of them available. But if you are looking for an API to perform a simple web search, good luck finding it. It took me an hour of searching on their site before I could find the one place where this is hidden. You think being google it'd be really easy to find this. But the web search is so core to everything it's hard to get the right results. And they don't have an obvious listing for this when you look at their various APIs since the basic web search is hidden inside the Google AJAX Search API.

You can read how to perform basic web searches using this API here http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/#fonje. Basically you use the AJAX search API and ignore all of the AJAX stuff.

While this API is great and much better than their previous SOAP API which was limited to 1000 requests per day (there are no limits on the number of searches that can be performed with the AJAX search API), it'd be nice if they made it a little more obvious how to do this seemingly simple task.