Getting a Google API Account

Question

What URL can I visit to get myself a Google API Account? While sites point to http://www.google.com/apis and talk of "easy steps", I just can't figure it out.

Background:

There are places on the web that offer google services if you give them your Google API account key (in my case http://www.freesitemapgenerator.com and index retrieval).

They say to go to http://www.google.com/apis, but that just redirects me to http://code.google.com. There are no "easy instructions" for me to follow to get an account.

Am I going crazy here? (I have analytics and webmaster tools etc activated, so I somewhat know what I'm doing).

Answer 1

Since December 2006, Google is no longer issuing these API keys

Answer 2

As far as I understand, you apply for an API key, and you can do that with any Google account. The various API's appear to require different keys. To get a key for the Maps API, visit:

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html

The products directory on Google Code lists each of the products for which Google appears to offer some sort of interaction from developers, some of which have API keys. Take a look at that page and visit the home page for each product in order to obtain a key.

Specifically, you can look at the Google AJAX API's page, which features each of the products for which an AJAX API exists.