Yahoo Debuts Search APIs 149
Dotnaught writes "With its planned introduction on Tuesday of new search APIs and a developer network, Yahoo aims to tap the creativity of the open source community. As the current issue of Wired points out, "Yahoo makes more money and has more patents, services and users than Google." Will nurturing a developer community have any impact on Yahoo's competitive position against Google and Microsoft?"
Nutch (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder if Yahoo are offering as much source access and simmilar licencing terms to this? (It appears from the articles that the APIs are purely for interaction with the Yahoo site).
Re:More users ? (Score:5, Informative)
While that is true for most searches, I still use them for mail, maps, and directions. I see a lot of people who use yahoo. Yahoo has been around a long time and they are well known by non-tech savvy people. My seventy-five year old mother is a good example of this. When her computer was installed, MSN was her start page. It still is and she uses it for her searching. I've thought of changing it for her, but it is what she is used to and she is happy with it.
"As for this API, that's a nice move but too late in my opinion, unless they have some serious advantage compared to Google's but some reason I doubt it."
Well according to the article:
"What Yahoo is offering, Walther contends, is much broader than what's offered by the competition. In a literal sense, that's true: Each API provides developers with access to 5,000 queries per day per API, five times more than the limits placed on users of the Google Web API. "We don't just have a Web search API," he explains. "We have Web, local, news video, image, and spelling, among others." And, he says, YSDN is about more than APIs; it's about the development community."
That is a lot of features, and the higher limit is cool too. I would bet that Google matches or exceeds them in the near future though.
Re:Yahoo (Score:5, Informative)
Re:More users ? (Score:2, Informative)
See Y! search API in action (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Higher limit (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I've got a real big problem... (Score:1, Informative)
For example, search requires massive bandwidth for your crawlers. Even if you try to distribute this, somebody has to buy the servers and bandwith that collates the results coming in from 8 billion or so pages. And you then have to deal with the problems of people deliberately sending in inaccurate indexes, and having a ranking algorithm that SEOs know, and can therefore please pretty much exactly.*
Maps again present a problem - you need to find data sources. While there are free programs for making maps (GMT, MapServer), there isn't a comprehensive set of free data. And it's not the sort of data that would work well for collaborative and distributed collection. Imagine a program which did 25% of what you needed - that's still more useful than doing nothing, and may well be "good enough" to get users which fill in the blanks. But 25% of a map is 0% useful; if you're walking, it's no use if most of your route is "here be dragons", you need to know if your route takes you over a cliff. If you need directions, it's no good if they only tell you the part of the route you knew anyway (think about it, the major roads will get filled in first). And when a road layout changes, it needs changing right away, and not to rely on a contributor living near enough to notice.
Going further, some services make no sense in an "open source" version. What are "open and free" personal ads? Ones where you can edit anyone's profile? Certainly, you could clone the software for each of Yahoo's services, but the value here comes from the users - a personals ad site with 10,000 users running on a custom platform is worth more than 1,000 sites running on an open platform, each with 50 users.**
Given enough thought, some of these problems should be defeatable, but maybe it isn't as simple as it looks.
* Yes, security through obscurity = bad. But designing a truly un-gamable algorithm is a *lot* harder.
** Numbers pulled from sky to illustrate point. Unlikely to represent actual subs figures.
Re:Yahoo (Score:3, Informative)
Things like I listed above is why I left Yahoo! for Google.
Re:More users ? (Score:1, Informative)
I was using Google exclusively until recently. You might want to search on more than one search engine in case you're looking for something a little obscure. If you're looking for a reasonably "popular" (whatever that might mean in the internet context) phrase/word, then the chances are that any search engine is good for you. There will be a significant overlap in the top matches returned by Yahoo or Google.
While we're on the subject of obscure topics, it also seems to me that a Google search is not that trustworthy anymore. I once read some newspaper articles in an Indian newspaper [hindu.com] which referred to a couple of Indian musicians. A few months ago, I wanted to check if these articles were online and Google did point me to them. Today a Google search [google.com] doesn't work whereas a Yahoo! search [yahoo.com] does. Since Yahoo! points you to the right links, it can't be that the newspaper doesn't want its content to be indexed. So either the Google index doesn't have this or the newspaper's been blacklisted by Google for some reason.
Re:Yahoo still exists? (Score:1, Informative)
I still keep coming across new services I didn't have the faintest idea existed, but which still have tens or hundreds of thousands of active users - it all adds up rather quickly.
(I work for Yahoo, btw.)
Re:More users ? (Score:2, Informative)
Yahoo's offering OTOH allows 5,000 queries *PER IP*, and *UNLIMITED* per application ID. The App ID is only used to keep tabs on where the queries originate, and isn't used to limit requests.
But then you didn't read the article, did you?
Re:ok... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Competition.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yahoo and Python (Score:3, Informative)
Google's search engine is not written in Python. They write a lot of tools and supplemental applications in Python, but the code is decidedly not in an interpreted language, no matter how studly.
It is interesting, however, that they do not include samples in Python but do include .NET and Java. But think about it: I'm sure their target developer is one who is integrating this into an application. Also note that the Google API is SOAP based, and perhaps at the time they released the SDK originally the Python SOAP support was less than complete.
Re:I've got a real big problem... (Score:1, Informative)
These are APIs to access Yahoos resources/services from YOUR application (should you choose to make one).
Let's say you're making a website or application... Want to be able to provide stock quotes, or weather forecasts, etc from within your app? Then you have the option of using the Yahoo APIs to pull that info into your app.
They're trying to get more people to use their stuff.