yahoo-search

Yahoo used to have an independent search engine but switched to using Microsoft Bing (for the most part) in 2010.

Previously: one of several independent search-engines that index and support microformats.

search site

• search.yahoo.com supports rel-nofollow (since 2005(?) citation needed).
• advanced search. Through additional user interfaces:
  • Yahoo Creative Commons search supported rel-license in the past.

search APIs and tools

BOSS

Yahoo supported a custom search API called BOSS until 2016-03-31 which had built-in microformats support.

• Yahoo Search BOSS
  • When calling the BOSS web search API, you can retrieve all structured data Yahoo! has extracted for the specified URLs via SearchMonkey, including any microformats. Just add the parameters "view=searchmonkey_feed&format=xml" to your web search API call. This is probably the most efficient way to fetch structured data from Yahoo!.
  • Build a semantic Search Engine with BOSS documents how to use Yahoo's BOSS API to access Yahoo SearchMonkey which supports the hAtom, hCalendar, hCard, hReview, XFN, geo, rel-tag, adr microformats.

SearchMonkey

Yahoo SearchMonkey supported hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, others - launched 2008 May, updated 2008-12-07, until it was shut down in 2010 October. SearchMonkey was Yahoo!'s program for collecting and displaying structured data, including microformats.

• You can inspect microformat and other structured data gathered by SearchMonkey by going to the SearchMonkey Developer Tool. However, if you are only interested in microformat data (i.e. you are not planning on building a full-fledged SearchMonkey application), it is more efficient to use BOSS or YQL.
• To inspect structured data directly on the Yahoo! Search page, install the Structured Data Display infobar.
• Microformat filtering on Yahoo! Search: The general form is "searchmonkey:com.yahoo.page.uf.<microformat> <additional query terms>". For example, you could search for all pages with hResume and the word "php". Note that "searchmonkey:" acts as a filter. You aren't inspecting the actual hResume content for the word "php", you are searching for all pages that A) have hResume and B) would be returned by an ordinary Yahoo! Search for "php".
  • search Yahoo for hCards (all of these searches tell you how many Search Monkey has found)
  • search Yahoo for hCalendar events
  • search Yahoo for hReviews
  • search Yahoo for hAtom
  • search Yahoo for XFN
  • search Yahoo for hResume
  • search Yahoo for adr
  • search Yahoo for GEO
  • search Yahoo for rel-tag
  • All of these microformat filters can be used with the BOSS API as well.

YQL

Yahoo Query Language used a SQL-like syntax to "normalize" web service calls. In addition to wrapping web services such as Flickr, Yelp, and Zillow, YQL also enabled you to extract content directly from web pages. As part of that functionality, YQL could query and filter on microformats from 2009-01-13 until YQL shut down on 2019-01-03.

For example, the YQL query:

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=select * from microformats where url%3D'http%3A%2F%2Fupcoming.yahoo.com%2Fvenue%2F23933%2F'&format=xml

extracts all microformats from a particular page on upcoming.yahoo.com.

Unlike BOSS and the simple microformat filters described above, you can use YQL to perform filtering and other operations on the microformat data itself.

see also

• search-engines
• implementations