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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?"
There is already a fairly scalable complete FOSS search-engine called Nutch which can (in theory) scale from an 'in website' search engine to a full-blown google-style search site.
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).
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
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.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
You should be comparing the http://search.yahoo.com/ site instead. It is pretty much identical to google.
I.O.U One Sig.
You mentioned you use Yahoo for maps. Try maps.google.com and you will never go back.
This guy has already built a prototype Image search tool using the Y! API.
http://btbytes.com - bytes of Bangalore, Technology and open source
Not only is the limit in general higher, but it's based on the "caller" IP instead of the developer account.
Things like I listed above is why I left Yahoo! for Google.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Google's offering (1,000 queries per ID key) makes their API unsuitable for use with Open Source applications; you can't embed the ID in a popular project and release it.
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?
Yahoo hasn't used any Google technology for over a year. Specifically, Yahoo replaced Google search with its own last February. Since then, Yahoo's share of the search market has actually increased. The latest figures from comScore show Google handling 35% of search queries and Yahoo handling 32%.
See http://johnbokma.com/perl/ for some small Google API examples using Perl. Although I miss some things, like the calculator, etc.
Perl Programmer for hire
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.