Yahoo has just introduced the Yahoo Search Developer Network, an online service offering developers access to Yahoo web services application programming interfaces (API’s) for the first time. The API’s are now freely available and are being promoted parallel to the existing Overture service API’s. Eckert Walther, head of Yahoo Search product management says “We’ve been asked by a lot of third-party developers for these APIs for a while,” “And we’ve recognized that search has gone from a consumer application to a much broader application platform.” Walther also offered the following example of how one of the API’s might find practical application: “Let’s say you had a restaurant review site where people could provide quick reviews, and you wanted to supply a spell checker. You could do that using the spell checker API.”
It appears that for the first time Yahoo may have actually built upon Google’s ideas and offered something superior. To begin with Yahoo offers a very interactive open discussion environment for developers. The developers network also has areas to post questions and show off applications that you have developed. Next we find that Yahoo allows 5,000 queries per day, per API; five times more searches than is allowed by the Google API. The Yahoo Search API also provides sample code and instructions for a greater number of platforms including Python and even JavaScript. Lastly the Yahoo API provides search access to a variety databases including local search, news video, image and spelling.