A Raft of Yahoo RSS Feeds and a Quick Search Trick

You probably knew that Yahoo was offering RSS feeds. There's a huge list of them available at http://developer.yahoo.net/rss/index.html#biglist. Properties covered here include not only Yahoo, but Flickr, Upcoming.org, and blo.gs.

What I really liked about this list, though, was a Yahoo trick; there's a template here to show how to build a URL that runs a Yahoo search and gets the results as an RSS feed. And you can do this without jumping through any programming hoops! Actually there are three of these Yahoo search RSS feeds available -- one for Web, Image, and Video search. Here's what they look like:

Internet Search

http://api.search.yahoo.com/WebSearchService/rss/webSearch.xml?appid=yahoosearchwebrss&query=keyword

Image Search

http://api.search.yahoo.com/ImageSearchService/rss/imageSearch.xml?appid=yahoosearchimagerss&query=keyword

Video Search

http://api.search.yahoo.com/VideoSearchService/rss/videoSearch.xml?appid=ysearchblog&format=mpeg&query=keyword

Replace keyword with your query. Combine words with +, (three+blind+mice = searching for three blind mice), remove words with +- (three+blind+-mice = searching for three blind -mice), and establish phrases with %22 (searching for %22three+blind+mice%22 finds the phrase "three blind mice".

Now if there were just some way to restrict the results you get to pages that have been indexed in the last few days....

Posted to Search Engines-Yahoo | TrackBack