Pardon the excessive number of OPs/new threads, but I carry of baggage of
things (have nad no search engine experts to me in a while).

There are various tools that apparently use Google's APIs to collect some
data of interest, e.g. number of indexed page for a given site. Recently I
noticed that some tools which rely on that service (including, for example,
http://www.tippy.co.uk/google-datacenter-check/ ) just don't seem to work. I
think the problem began a fortnight ago. Any ideas as to why? Is it
permanent?

Maybe Google's ISP his concerned about his/her bandwidth? Or maybe the FTC is
handcuffing Google over his/her $310 double-clicking madness? Has Larry Page
gone on a cruise and forgotten to pay the Web host?

So many question. So little time. All our SERPs are belong (sic) to Google,
but where has Google gone hiding? I hope they are not retracting services
now that they have grown to the point of no going back...