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Yahoo Debuts Search APIs

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stepping-up-the-search-race dept.

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?"

5 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Nutch by reality-bytes · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

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  2. Re:More users ? by krgallagher · · Score: 4, Informative
    "I'm surprised Yahoo has a larger user base than Google. All the people I talk to have given up using Yahoo and use Google all the time, including me."

    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.

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  3. Re:Yahoo by shird · · Score: 5, Informative

    You should be comparing the http://search.yahoo.com/ site instead. It is pretty much identical to google.

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  4. See Y! search API in action by btbytes · · Score: 3, Informative

    This guy has already built a prototype Image search tool using the Y! API.

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    http://btbytes.com - bytes of Bangalore, Technology and open source
  5. Re:Competition.. by John+Bokma · · Score: 3, Informative

    See http://johnbokma.com/perl/ for some small Google API examples using Perl. Although I miss some things, like the calculator, etc.

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