AH querying programmatically without AutoIt/AHK/image comparisons

[user9544728]

I'm interested in creating a C# application to query the AH mainly for the purposes of implementing better search filters and displaying results better than the D3 AH interface currently does. I understand that there are plenty of AH bots out there right now but they all seem to use image comparisons and fake clicking/SendKey methods. Instead, I'd like to create this in a way that involves sending out a query and getting a full list of results back that can be parsed and displayed in my application. I've heard that WoW had an API that allowed this and that D3 may eventually come out with one. Does this sound attainable currently? Where can I start?

[Nablamax]

There is also OCR, I've tried the simpletesseract library for autoIT and the results are mixed: it's easy to use, it works decently with numbers (bid and buyout values) if you take the time to manually correct a few bugs, like replacing 'S' with '5' etc. However, it works sketchy at best with timers and is plain horrible with item names, at least when you try reading them from the completed tab - the font that blizzard uses is really bad for OCR.

I highly doubt Blizzard will release an API for the AH any time soon, since that will only make AH programming easier/faster/more efficient. That can only lead to more abuse from AH bots and a poorer experience for the end user.