I also used the search API here: http://chir.ag/wiki/bingo - Wikipedia search. I almost always end up doing site:wikipedia.org when I'm looking for articles on a topic. Now I just go to chir.ag/wiki/%s and it works great. I do not have to do anything on the server end and Google's JS search APIs handle everything. It works especially well when I don't know the correct spelling or even the most relevant keywords.
I wouldn't think of Google API as being complex enterprise-y APIs. They have really powerful JS APIs that you can use on the client side. This puts less stress on the server and you don't get rate limited. I've also used YouTube API in the past and it was pretty decent.
I also used the search API here: http://chir.ag/wiki/bingo - Wikipedia search. I almost always end up doing site:wikipedia.org when I'm looking for articles on a topic. Now I just go to chir.ag/wiki/%s and it works great. I do not have to do anything on the server end and Google's JS search APIs handle everything. It works especially well when I don't know the correct spelling or even the most relevant keywords.
I wouldn't think of Google API as being complex enterprise-y APIs. They have really powerful JS APIs that you can use on the client side. This puts less stress on the server and you don't get rate limited. I've also used YouTube API in the past and it was pretty decent.