The announcement, made at the New York-based Search Engine Strategies 2005 Conference & Expo on the eve of the search giant’s 10-year anniversary, coincides with Yahoo’s decision to drop the Overture Services brand and rename its keyword-selling business as Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions.
“We have worked closely with the development community to create a new program designed to stimulate open discussion, experimentation and development of new search applications,” said Dr. David Ku, Yahoo’s director of engineering. “We believe that it is critical to provide the development community with both the search APIs and interactive resources to help foster the discovery of innovative applications leveraging Yahoo search technology.”
Yahoo hopes to stimulate developers by providing a variety of mailing lists and discussion groups, an application showcase, a blog and a “wiki”-like application that will allow the sharing of ideas and feedback.
The largest feature provided by the new resource is access to the Yahoo Search API, which will enable developers to incorporate Yahoo Search technology into their applications.
In order to ease the introduction of the new API into the developer community, Yahoo said that it will offer a variety of sample code in the most popular web application development languages, including Perl, Python, PHP and JavaScript.
The company also will roll the Overture API, available since 2001, into the offering, and provide developers with access to 5,000 queries per day per API.
The introduction of the API finally brings Yahoo up to speed with Google, which has been offering a programming interface for its search engine for about three years and began offering an API for its AdWords program in late January.
In honor of the company’s 10th birthday on Wednesday, Yang also offered a look both back and forward at the Search Engine Strategies conference and revealed a little of Yahoo’s future business plans, which apparently involve moving into the blogging market.
Currently, Yahoo offers free, hosted web pages with its GeoCities service, which funds the pages by placing pay-per-click advertisements on each page. Yang said that the company may be taking a cue from Google’s acquisition of Blogger and applying that theory to blogs.
“Following our experience in GeoCities, which still has millions and millions of homepages, you can look for us to be fairly open and encouraging to people to use the tools we already have to leverage blogging,” Yang said. “Blogging has great content and great community appeal.”
At the moment, Yahoo offers blog-publishing service in both Japan and Korea, but Yang did not mention whether those offerings will expand to the U.S.