Google Kills Another Free Service

Warning: file_get_contents(http://www.google.com/ig/api?weather=Winnipeg%2C+MB&hl=en): failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden in…

Google seems to have a pattern of developing cool nich projects using their huge resources, releasing them for free to the public, and then killing them with short or no notice. I can only assume it might be due to rolling them into some other product, or finding no financial gain for them internally. One of these recently was an “undocumented” weather API service, for retrieving world wide weather information.

I personally have been using this for a while now, after developing a PHP script to update a web page on one of my own websites. I know weather info can be found almost anywhere these days, but not easily for free without ads, limitations or some annoyance. I simply wanted a weather page with current stats and forecasts. Now I’ll have to adapt it to some other service.

Thanks Google! What did it really cost you to share the weather API with the few people around the world that made use of it? Was it cutting into your $billions$ in the bank to share a little weather info freely? Is it evil to kill these truly free services (no ads revenue) when Google is already so incredibly profitable?