There is new debate whether Google Inc. and other leading search engines should standardize the way computer programmers get at their storehouses of information.

Also at issue is how often a developer's application is entitled to dip into a search engine's Internet catalogs.

The discussion focuses on a common API, a way in which computer programs interact. Companies don't have to release an API, yet many do because it's an inexpensive way to expose products and services to a wider audience.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, the three leading search engines, each have different APIs. Each allows computer programmers to create services that use material that the search engine collected.

In the search, Google limits computer programs to 1,000 inquiries a day. Microsoft's cap is 10,000, while Yahoo Inc. allows 50,000 queries a day. Ideally, software writers say, queries should be unlimited.

Web pioneer Dave Winer suggested last week in a widely read Weblog posting that Yahoo and Microsoft should copy Google's API and adopt it as their own, and also lift the cap on inquiries.

"We got a good demo of what might be, now three years later, it's time for the real thing," Winer wrote on his blog. He said in an interview Monday that a common search API is "inevitable."

He added that if unlimited queries are not possible, the companies should make the limit practical for serious Internet applications, "Perhaps 1 million queries per day? Let's work this out."

Winer most recently sold his Weblogs.com business, an important blogging company, to VeriSign Inc. for several millions of dollars.

Read more here about the VeriSign deal.

Winer's view is supported by Robert Scoble, a Microsoft technical evangelist. On his blog, Scoble wrote that cloning the Google API "won't be easy. We are rapacious, greedy businesspeople who don't like to share a service that costs tens of millions of dollars. Google knows this and is laughing all the way to the bank."

A Google spokesperson said the company "has no plans to change the API" in answer to Winer's call for unlimited access by developers. The spokesperson had no immediate comment on Winer's suggest of adopting a common API.

Click here to read about Google's release of an API for its AdWords program.

Winer's notion, discussed by hundreds of bloggers in the last few days, has some detractors.

Many point out that even with a common API, the goal of ubiquitous, unfettered search programs still won't be possible, because the search industry has yet to settle on a common language to use to make actual search inquiries.

"I don't think there is much of a prospect for that to change for a while," one commenter wrote recently on the blog Mackmo.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.