Today’s Webmaster Help video from Google includes something of an announcement. Matt Cutts reveals that the company is working on some upcoming changes to the Webmaster Tools API.

The video is a response to the user-submitted question:

Can you tell us if Webmaster Tools will ever have an update to its API allowing us to retrieve the “Search Queries” and “Backlinks” data?

“The answer is yes,” says Cutts. “That’s the short answer. The longer answer is, we’re working on it, and we hope to release it relatively soon. In the meantime, right now, there are PHP – there’s Python libraries that you can use to download the data, and so in the description (the meta information for this video) will include a few links where you can go and download toolkits that will allow you to get access to the data right now.”

Here’s the link the description provides for downloading Search Queries data using Python. Here’s the one for PHP (not an official Google project).

“And we’re gonna keep looking at how we can improve our API to get you more and more information over time,” Cutts says in the video’s conclusion.

No time frame is given for when we might see an update to the API, but it sounds like it’s not too far off.