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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?"

16 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm... by Anonymous Coward · · 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...

  2. Uses of API by nsasch · · 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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  3. More users ? by Choron · · 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 · · 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 · · 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 · · 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:Competition.. by treerex · · 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.

  5. Higher limit by whitelines · · 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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  6. Re:Doubt by MikeDX · · 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.

  7. Re:Doubt by KenBot_314 · · 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.

  8. 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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  9. I've got a real big problem... by blackhedd · · 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 gorbachev · · 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.

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      In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
  10. 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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  11. 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
  12. 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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    Perl Programmer for hire