Just in time for it’s 10 year anniversary, Yahoo opened up API access to its search platform. Allowing programmatic access to search services via URLs is a trail that Google has already blazed but in what maybe another arms race as we saw with hosted email storage, Yahoo allows five times the number of queries; 5,000 over a 24 hour period.
There’s already an O’Reilly Hacks book in the queue (what’s with the cowboy boots on the cover anyway?), a growing list of applications that’s hosted on a wiki, and, a developer’s weblog running on our favorite blog platform, Movable Type.
Jeremy Zawodny has done a great job of bringing together all the right tools to get this ecosystem off the ground and is clearly the booster that made it happen. Great work!
Opening up access this way ties in nicely with Yahoo’s media hub strategy which distributes their services in order to drive people back to Yahoo properties, boosting page views for advertising and brand awareness. The question on everyone’s mind is if the Search API set is a trial balloon for a broader rollout of other services. Yahoo IM? Finance? Music? Maps? Horoscope API anyone?
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