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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?"
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.
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.
"Naughty, naughty, naughty, you filthy old soomka !"
Yahoo is HUGE. By having a developer's community not only will it attract all the geeks from /. but also tap into the infinite intelligence that is not tied to any corporate world
fuvoo: watch something
Yahoo may have more services, but their interface is so cluttered it's difficult to find them. Compare Google's home page to Yahoo's. If you are just interested in a simple search, Google is great. If you are interested in more services, click the "more" link and then you see the services nicely laid out. Yahoo's home page, on the other hand, is so cluttered I get dizzy just looking for the "Weather" link. Alright, well, not dizzy, but it takes a few seconds.
"Yahoo makes more money and has more patents, services and users than Google." - I haven't checked but are they still using google tech for half those services? and has for having more users. Considering some ISP's have partnerships with Yahoo and set the users homepage to Yahoo... and we all know how the average user doesn't even know how to change their homepage to something they actually want.
A psychopath can't tell the difference between right and wrong. A sociopath knows the difference - he just doesn't care.
I would imagine yahoo has the bigger userbase (registered). I know 10x more people with yahoo addresses than gmail addresses and thats only within my so called nerdy friends. Add non-nerdy people such as family and even by conducting a local poll, I would guess yahoo outnumbers google membership by at least 5:1. Depends who they are counting and whos figures they are using. You can prove anything with fancy charts and ratios.
I for one love what google has recently done by integrating their search functionality with their new maps, and I can see the potential for incredibly useful websites using API's like this. Yahoo needs to have a good product here if they have any hope of regaining users in the search engine category. On a related note, I am surprised that Microsoft didn't release something thing similar with the re-launch of their improved search engine. Might a release be coming soon?
Yahoo is not just a search engine. I know lots of people that automatically think of sites like maps.yahoo.com, or autos.yahoo.com, or finance.yahoo.com, or anything_that_I_need_to_do_online.yahoo.com instead of other services... Yahoo is still strong in a lot of fields.
"Will nurturing a developer community have any impact on Yahoo's competitive position against Google and Microsoft?"
Too bad Yahoo didn't try this 10-12 years ago, before Google existed, and while Microsoft was still claiming the internet was a fad.
It might have even worked then, it doens't have much chance now, the others will just copy whatever Yahoo does that hppens to work.
Why on earth would any intelligent, well-motivated and talented hacker want to work for Yahoo/Google/IBM/Sun/whoever WITHOUT getting a salary from them? All of these companies that are talking about tapping the capabilities and intelligence of the "community" must think we have no intelligence at all!
It's the same thing with open-sourcing Solaris. Anybody who is talented and enthusiastic enough to make serious contributions to a major search engine or operating system should be doing it to benefit the whole community, not just to make some major corporation even richer.
We already know about the open alternatives to Solaris. Where is the open and free alternative to Yahoo? I'll contribute time and money to it!
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...
That's the whole point. API's are aimed at the tech-savvy group.
A lot of your friends probably use Yahoo without even realising it through one of the long range of Yahoo services provided in partnership with other companies.
Add to that a few million users of Yahoo co-branded dial up and broadband services....
Schemas aren't intended to be universal.
They are intended to support defining the structure of data for a given problem domain.
Yahoo is using schemas exactly as intended.
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