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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?"

11 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 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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  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 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.

  7. 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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  8. 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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  9. 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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