Very cool. I'm thinking it would be great if elance-type of sites, or even experts exchange, would have an area where a prospective employer can submit small coding questions to potential employees.

VC's have nothing to do with optimism, and everything to do with who you are. If you're an "insider", chances are you'll get funded even if your product is absolute crap. If you're an unknown entity, good luck getting funded even if you have a killer product.

nl,

There are two issues here:

1. You can ask for more, but how many will they give you? and 2. The fact that you need a key, makes it virtually useless for wide use in applications or websites. With the old api which didn't require a key, you had, practically speaking no limit when calling the api client-side. With the key that option falls away.

With the new API console you can authorize/deauthorize your key on a per-website basis.

API keys are pretty standard for APIs - I hardly see that as a problem. The old version had one too: http://code.google.com/apis/loader/signup.html

Huge difference between the two, unfortunately. The CSE is made for specific websites, not web-wide search. And it's limited to 100 queries (more if you ask for it, but still limited) per day per key. Compare that to the previous unlimited search api!

Maybe the oldfashioned way; by putting a bunch of spiders out there? Don't forget they've been working on the index for a while now.

I think the biggest news here (which I think Google tried to hide under all the announcements of "new" stuff) is that the web search ajax api was deprecated. There is no no official way to search the entire web with a Google api. I imagine this will be painful to many many sites and applications out there.