NYCPHP Meetup

[sbeam]

On Friday 26 September 2008 21:02, (Margaret) Michele Waldman wrote:
> I went with google search.
>
> The search results are black font on a white background.  I don't know what
> color the links are yet, because the site hasn't been indexed.
>
> I don't think it's customizable, which fully means it was a lousy choice.
>
> If it's not I'm going to advise my customer to cancel her account and I'll
> use swish-e.

Sorry I am late to this thread, but Yahoo! has! a! webservice! for! search!

http://developer.yahoo.com/search/web/

no ads, no cost.

It's limited to something like 5000 queries a day, which shouldn't be a 
problem for small sites. You can limit the results to your site of course. It 
will even return the results as a serialized php array, which you can 
unserialize and then iterate over to display it however you want. Couldn't be 
much easier.

example:
http://www.copleysociety.org/

The disadvantage v/s your own local spider like SWISH-E is that you can't 
control it - a change to your site might take a week or more to show up in 
search results. Also you can't index things that are password protected.

[The disadvantage with SWISH-E is that it is completely useless as a search 
engine. The matching algorithm is primitive to say the least. It does however 
a good job of thrashing your server when it runs.]

There is of course no direct financial benefit to Yahoo! to doing this, I am 
not sure why they do. (If MSFT had bought them you can be sure this would be 
the kind of thing kicked to the curb immediately :)

Sam