Yahoo! Search Web Services Are Alive!

Yahoo has one-upped Google with the announcement of their API. Google has been doing this for a while now (3 years), but you never hear anything new about it like you do with Amazon's API where new applications seems to appear on a daily basis.

The SDK includes BSD-licensed examples in Perl, Python, PHP, Java and JavaScript (Google's SDK includes Java and .NET examples), and accesses Image, Web, Video, Local, and News searches (last time I looked, Google did Web, Cache, and Spelling)! Yahoo's API uses REST rather than SOAP, which I personally find much easier to work with.

Yahoo's stuff includes:

• The ability to do 5,000 queries a day (Google's limit is 1,000)
• Use of REST instead of SOAP.
• Developer Weblog
• Developer Wiki
• Developer Mailing Lists

Take a look at Yahoo! Web Services a quick tour on O'Reilly Network by Paul Bausch. Oh yeah, there will also be a Yahoo! Hacks book this summer.