June 28, 2005

My Web 2.0

Yahoo! just announced My Web 2.0 and I'm happy to confirm that there's a webservice to go with it. My Web 2.0 is, among other things, a tagging platform, and the three webservice methods enable you to slice and dice the public tags in a whole variety of ways.

tagSearch - Find out what tags have been applied to a URL, or what tags people are applying in general.

urlSearch - Find URLs that have been tagged in a specific fashion.

relatedTags - Want to know what other tags users have been applying to sites tagged with 'yahoo'? Or 'music'? Both? This method will let you do that.

All the functions will let you filter by a Yahoo! ID, so you can look at other people's public tag space and see what tags they like to apply, and when. Or use it to show off your tag space wherever you want.

There's a ton that can be done with just these three functions, but if there's something else you'd like to see in the webservices, let us know in the comments. In the meantime, check out My Web 2.0 and start tagging and sharing!

Toby Elliott
Yahoo! Webservices

Posted at 5:46 PM | Comments (6)

June 21, 2005

Subscription Search

Last week, Yahoo! Search announced personal search subscriptions, allowing users to retrieve results from password-protected sites. We're happy to report that the webservice also supports this, through the use of the subscription parameter. Just pass in the codes for the subscriptions you have and we'll add them into the returned search results.

More details are available on the Web Search documentation page.

Toby Elliott
Yahoo! Webservices

Posted at 11:01 AM | Comments (1)

June 17, 2005

Wanted: AJAX Interface Developers

It seems strange to be talking about user interfaces on a site devoted to webservices. After all, a query to the WebSearch API produces output that only a programmer could love. But for a large segment of you, the availablity of that data without markup is license to let your interface-designer self run wild, producing pages that bend, fold, spindle and mutilate that data in crazy ways. There are some great examples out there, and I know there's a bunch more of you doing amazing things with the data.

In short, we're looking to hire people who love to push the boundaries of what modern DHTML and especially AJAX can do, working with our external webservices and internal ones as well. Why yes, we have internal webservices. Will you see them someday? No comment.

If you live and breathe DHTML we're looking to fill all sorts of positions. If you see one that's right for you, send in your resume. If not, keep an eye on http://careers.yahoo.com. We're just getting started.

Toby Elliott
Yahoo! Webservices

Posted at 9:25 AM | Comments (3)

June 10, 2005

Application ID Confusion

I've seen a bit of confusion in various articles and some blogs about the application id, and I wanted to take the time to clear up a popular misconception:

Your application id has absolutely nothing to do with rate limiting. Your IP address has *everything* to do with rate limiting.

Getting yourself another id will not allow you to get more queries. The application id is for self-identification, to help you get some basic usage tracking and to let us get in touch with you if one of your applications has a bug that needs fixing. That's it. Think of it like the User-Agent string a browser sends out.

So, the next time you read something that says "per application id," ignore it. If you have suggestions as to how we could make this clearer, we'd love to hear them in the comments.

Toby Elliott
Yahoo! Webservices

Posted at 10:12 AM | Comments (2)

June 8, 2005

Create an Application With Y!Q for Chance to Win $5,000

Take the Y!Q Challenge: Show the world an innovative use of Y!Q Beta, our contextual search technology, on one of your web sites and you could win $5,000!

Y!Q, introduced earlier this year, is an innovation from Yahoo! Search that analyzes the content of a Web page and provides contextually relevant search results at the moment of search inspiration.

You can integrate Y!Q into your site and create a more engaging experience by providing your visitors with related search results directly on your website pages. Y!Q allows users to learn more about related topics without interruption and without having to leave your site.

Enter the Y!Q Challenge by June 16th at: http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/yq/challenge

For further information about Y!Q, including instructions for implementation, please visit: http://yq.search.yahoo.com/publisher/embed.html

Toby Elliott
Yahoo! Webservices

Posted at 12:00 PM | Comments (4)