Yahoo Debuts Search APIs

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Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday March 1, 2005 @02:20AM 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?"

36 of 149 comments (clear)

Hmm... by Anonymous Coward · 2005-03-01 02:23 · Score: 5, Funny

Yahoo makes more money and has more patents...
Yeah, they sure do know how to get on open-source developers' good sides, don't they...
1. Re:Hmm... by GeckoX · 2005-03-01 06:44 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  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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  No Comment.
Uses of API by nsasch · 2005-03-01 02:24 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

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More users ? by Choron · 2005-03-01 02:24 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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1. Re:More users ? by TripMaster+Monkey · 2005-03-01 02:31 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  All the people I talk to have given up using Yahoo and use Google all the time, including me.
  
  I'm betting that's because all the people you talk to are reasonably savvy in this area (like yourself), and thus do not represent a typical cross-section of the population.
  
  Yahoo has a much larger following among less-tech-savvy folks...it seems to occupy the area between Google and AOL (in terms of users, not services offered).
  
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2. Re:More users ? by krgallagher · 2005-03-01 02:38 · 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:More users ? by Laurentiu · 2005-03-01 02:41 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  I do believe their user base numbers are biased. Back when Yahoo was "the thing" (they even had free POP3 on their mail service, I thought that was SO COOL), everyone and their dog had e-mail accounts on Yahoo. As in "more than one" account. Not only for multiple identities, but also for overcoming the limit in storage.
  
  Besides, having a "large user base" has nothing to do with the quality of developers you are able to attract. AOL has a large user base, how many /.ers would even consider doing development for free for AOL? The high-tech and university crowds were won over by Google years ago, with a simple, fast and ad-free interface, doubled by excelent service. Even when Google wasn't around, Altavista was the search engine of choice, not Yahoo.
  
  And remember, folks, this new "open-source-friendly" Yahoo is the same one that went through the "messenger wars" last year, trying to keep ad-free instant messengers like GAIM and Trillian out of their networks. I for one will sit back, relax, and stick with Google.
  
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  Just /. IT
4. Re:More users ? by menem · 2005-03-01 02:57 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  You mentioned you use Yahoo for maps. Try maps.google.com and you will never go back.
5. Re:More users ? by Anonymous Coward · 2005-03-01 05:22 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  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?
Re:Competition.. by treerex · 2005-03-01 02:27 · Score: 4, Interesting

Google released their APIs 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 by whitelines · 2005-03-01 02:30 · Score: 5, Interesting

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

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/* TBD */
1. Re:Higher limit by endx7 · 2005-03-01 04:18 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Not only is the limit in general higher, but it's based on the "caller" IP instead of the developer account.
2. Re:Higher limit by fiftyfly · 2005-03-01 07:41 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  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 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.
  
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  "Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
Re:Doubt by MikeDX · 2005-03-01 02:31 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.
Potential for great website development by Jokernick5 · 2005-03-01 02:31 · Score: 2, Insightful

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?
Re:Doubt by KenBot_314 · 2005-03-01 02:32 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.
Re:Yahoo by nsasch · 2005-03-01 02:34 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.

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Nutch by reality-bytes · 2005-03-01 02:37 · 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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1. Re:Nutch by reality-bytes · 2005-03-01 03:17 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  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. ;-)
  
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  Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
12 year head start by whoda · 2005-03-01 02:39 · Score: 2, Insightful

"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.
I've got a real big problem... by blackhedd · 2005-03-01 02:40 · Score: 4, Insightful

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!
1. Re:I've got a real big problem... by Fnagaton · 2005-03-01 04:20 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  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?
  
  Because there are some programmers, like me, who code because it is a hobby and do code regardless of being paid. The challenge of producing good code is often enough reward. Making money from a hobby is a happy bonus.
  
  --
  Martin Piper
  Owner - ReplicaNet and RNLobby
2. Re:I've got a real big problem... by gorbachev · 2005-03-01 04:47 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  If I want to use one of these APIs to create something cool for my own website or my own education and entertainment, should I ask Yahoo/Google for money? Wake up.
  
  --
  In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Re:Doubt by telecsan · 2005-03-01 02:43 · Score: 2, Interesting

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 by szlevente · 2005-03-01 02:43 · Score: 2, Interesting

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...
1. Re:Yahoo and Python by treerex · 2005-03-01 08:08 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  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.
Re:Yahoo by shird · 2005-03-01 02:48 · 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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Exclusive! Inside look into Yahoo's future! by Shoten · 2005-03-01 03:02 · Score: 2, Funny

We've gained exclusive access to the future of Yahoo, and are proud to give you the first ever look into the brilliant things being developed even now, as we speak, by this cutting-edge portal search engine! All the details right here!

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Re:Doubt by sapped · 2005-03-01 03:07 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.
See Y! search API in action by btbytes · 2005-03-01 03:16 · Score: 3, Informative

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

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1. Re:See Y! search API in action by SmokeHalo · 2005-03-01 04:15 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  Funny, I would've thought this guy's server would be a pile of flaming ruins as the /. crowd rushed over there to find out how to create their own personal Natalie Portman search...
  
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  I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. - Q
quantity & quality by sootman · 2005-03-01 04:05 · Score: 2, Funny

"Yahoo makes more money and has more patents, services and users than Google."

Yeah, all Google has is better search results. :-)

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Re:Yahoo by AstroDrabb · 2005-03-01 04:23 · Score: 2, Informative

Not only that, but Yahoo still favors IE for a lot of their content. I switched all my searches to Google and switched from Yahoo Mail to GMail because of that. For example, Yahoo! Mail has a feature that lets you do some rich text entry instead of plain text. However it only works in IE 5.5+. Mozilla/Firefox support rich text editing, so why leave out those browsers? There are plenty of cross-browser rich text editors out there, even an Open Source cross-browser richtext editor called FCKeditor. It works with plain HTML, ASP, PHP, JSP and others. I also always have problems getting the news video clips to play on Yahoo!. Yahoo! always tries to default to Windows Meadia even though I keep setting my prefs to Real.
Things like I listed above is why I left Yahoo! for Google.

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it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Re:ok... by AntigonusPiglet · 2005-03-01 05:57 · Score: 2, Informative

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%.
Re:Competition.. by John+Bokma · 2005-03-01 06:32 · 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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This is cool... by eries · 2005-03-01 06:41 · Score: 2, Interesting

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

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