It seems that no one has noticed that Google have brought back programmatic access to their search results. It’s now REST based (instead of the old SOAP API), and is documented as part of the AJAX APIs.
Interestingly, they only return results in JSON format, which is less than ideal but better than nothing.
does this mean people can extract SERP results again using the AJAX API like they use to with the SOAP API?
Maybe they are goign to get rid of the SOAP API access keys all together now.
I found that on April 3rd. It is probably on at April 1st so no one really paid attention to it.