YNAPS -- Yahoo Non-API Proximity Search

Try using an artificial NEAR search for Yahoo:

Find Word One:

Within 12345 spaces of

Word Two: .

Any additional words?

Yahoo doesn't offer an API, which might explain the dearth of Yahoo Hacks. However it does offer an unlimited query structure, which means that you can use Perl to noodle up bloody huge queries and open the search results directly at Yahoo.

Since the Google API Proximity Search ( Wonderfully done at Staggernation) is somewhat limited by Google's query search limit and API, I wanted to see what I could do with Yahoo. (See arbitrarily huge query experiments from August.)

While there are some things you can do with GAPS that you can't do with this (like sorting results in order of proximity), this search allows you to find words within five spaces of each other, instead of only up to three. Basically it's a script that takes your words, builds a series of query components based on your search, and then outputs the whole thing and opens a Yahoo result URL.

(For those of you playing along at home, Yahoo does not offer a full-word wildcard, like Google's *. However, you can use a stop-word as a full-word wildcard. In the case of this search, the stopword "a" is substituting for a full-word wildcard. You'll see how it works on the Yahoo results page.)

Big thanks to Greg Notess who pointed out in his Web Search University presentation that Google was the only major search engine that had even an artificial NEAR search, and who apparently didn't notice me giggling madly after he said that and outlining YNAPS in my conference notebook.

I'm still messing around with this and it might change a bit. Feel free to send feedback. Thankee.

Posted to Search Engines-Yahoo | TrackBack