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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 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.
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!