[moron4hire]

> To my surprise every 10 refreshes or so, I would get a 404 error. For the hardcoded resource no less! It's frustrating to work with an API that already seems unreliable when testing locally.

Google actively does this with many of their APIs. Running locally, their APIs will be very unreliable. Once you're live on the domain you've configured, everything is much more reliable.

I don't know if they do it to force you to consider cases where the API returns errors, or if it's some kind of anti-scraping provision, but it can be extremely confusing and frustrating if it's your first time working with the API and you're not sure how things are going to actually work (if at all!) when you deploy.