Thoughts on Search and APIs

Searching and APIs

APIs that are a subset of search
Often an API is a subset of search. Anytime a user of the API gets a list of items back matching some criteria, it might be a search query written as an API call. One can often turn search queries into an API call. For example, give me objects that were created on day X (date: xx/yy/zzzz).
```
List<ObjectType> getObjectsCreatedOn(Date someDay)
```
So some API calls have a corresponding search query.
Search is a desired/required feature
If users want to search some criteria to display, debug or measure datasets, then they may want a search API. It's better to have the search API early to leverage it later on, when it's worthwile.
One search API vs many equivalent API calls
One can reduce many equivalent API calls to a single search API. One still needs typing for the search result objects and potentially transforming objects from a serialized form to a reified form (e.g. bytes -> plain old objects).