APIs.io Developer Blog (RSS)

APIs.io is the first API search engine. Built on top of the APIs.json specification, APIs.io empowers API producers to publish APIs.json indexes of their API operations. APIs.json provides metadata about each API being published, but also the things humans need to put APIs to work like a sign-up, documentation, and pricing page, but also the things other systems will need like an OpenAPI or JSON Schema artifact. APIs.io was first launched alongside the APIs.json specification, but is now b...

API search is hard. We haven’t seen a successful solution emerge in the last 20 years, and I think we need to think differently when it comes to this problem. We have a lot of ideas about how search should work, but we wanted to take incremental steps towards testing out what people (and systems) need when it comes to discovering APIs.

When Steve asked me what we could do with APIs.io, I knew I wanted to improve upon what APIs.io v1 was as an API search, but I also lay the groundwork for what we need to help alleviate our API discovery pain. Every time I have made an investment in API discovery over the last decade, I also find myself considering what constitutes a good API, as well as a bad API, but also effectively dealing with the change that is inevitable across the API landscape. I knew that search would be importan...

I wanted to develop a prototype of the APIs.io search that brought the API search engine back to life using the APIs.json format. However, in the same motion I wanted to address two shortcomings that we never got around to developing before: 1) having it actually pull and update the APIs.json file, and 2) providing a rating system for the APIs that would help us filter out the garbage and identify the high quality APIs.