Yahoo Debuts Search APIs

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?"

Uses of API

[nsasch]

I kept a blog for a while that used some Google API to get some statistics. I never found a need for anything near accuracy in the results. I think the results that API bring, won't require a preference of one search engine versus another. If Google API is already being used, unless there are needed features, not many people will probably switch over.

Re:Competition..

[treerex]

Google released their APIs [google.com] years ago. Unfortunately they don't update them as often as one would like, such as adding better support for East Asian and RTL languages.

Higher limit

[whitelines]

The web search limit is 5,000. Hopefully this will push google to increase theirs.
http://developer.yahoo.net/web/V1/webSearch.html [yahoo.net]

Re:Yahoo

[nsasch]

and probably the only reason Google has a simple home page is the same reason it started that way, the authors didn't know how to do HTML. Just be glad we have the Google Search button, that wasn't there at first, 'Enter' was the only way to search.

Re:Doubt

[telecsan]

You underestimate the power of mass numbers of users with Yahoo! Mail accounts. Yes, among the tech-savvy group, Google usage is dominant. However, Yahoo still has longevity and familiarity on its side, and there are many less savvy users for whom Google offers no 'significant' benefit to make it worth the switch.

Yahoo and Python

[szlevente]

It's interesting that Google, with a search engine mainly written in Pyton, does not offer examples in Python for their API, as Yahoo does. Just Java and .NET. Yahoo on the other side doesn't have .NET programming examples...however, it rides on the popularity of the other languages. Is Yahoo at war with Microsoft for censoring .NET? I'm sure there are lots of .NET experts at Yahoo...

Re:Nutch

[reality-bytes]

Scalable... you keep using that word. I do not think that it means what you think it means.

When referring to Nutch, I mean scalable from single processor systems (as would typically run single website searches) to multiple processor (clustered) systems for running full web-search sites.

What were you thinking I was meaning?

If the reference to Java implies non-scalability, Sun would tell you otherwise but I (personally) am giving no warranties either way. ;-)

This is cool...

[eries]

if you're looking to try it out, want to come help port gvcard (http://gvcard.sf.net/ [sf.net]) to use Yahoo Local as well as Google Local?

Re:Higher limit

[fiftyfly]

I certainly hope so. I've toyed with the google API for a number of things but the one 'toy' that gets smacked around a lot is a related: links [edey.org] spider. A trivial idea that everyone and their dog did when the API was new. The problem is that since every URI is unique, and the googlebot became rather stupid in the middle of jan, I've been getting 3-4000 requests for (basically) the same bloody page every day. The googlebot isn't smart enough, apparently, to see it's GETting the same page with different parameters somthing like 35000 times in the last several weeks.

The upshot is I've had some fun (as in omg - I'm log grepping bored fun) watching the damned thing even as it's sucked up waaay more than my alotted api searches every day thereby (even with caching) making anything else I use it for useless.