Y! Search Frustrations
Asides, Google, Yahoo
Why Yahoo search still sucks. Why Google doesn’t. Too bad Google can’t get off their butt with great APIs (available in JSON and PHP serializations) like Yahoo has. I guess I’ll try to hack something out using inurl: or intitle:. Not to mention Yahoo still can’t handle basic HTML entities in titles.
Ya, this has been frustrating. I tried all weekend to search wordpress.org support forums and never got any results.
So…what’s wrong with this?
http://api.search.yahoo.com/WebSearchService/V1/webSearch?appid=YahooDemo&query=inurl:wordpress.org/support/%202.0.2
Seems to do what you want.
Ryan, as you posted this comment I just figured out that was possible. I guess I was just used to Google’s site: syntax for that. Thanks for the tip!
The character problem stands though, look at the ” in every one of those results.
I bet if you bring it up in the Y! Group they’ll get on it pretty quickly. They’re fairly responsive when people find problems and have good, reproducible test cases (like you do).
I was actually having a hard time finding all of the advanced search options, but I finally found them here.
Hmm, now I’m stuck with combinations. I want to search forums and the Codex, and inurl will block one or the other. You can’t seem to do OR for inurl:, or perhaps as above I just haven’t found it.
Well, this query returns results…although I can’t tell if it’s exactly what you’re looking for:
inurl:wordpress.org/support/ OR site:codex.wordpress.org 2.0.2
http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/search?p=inurl%3Awordpress.org%2Fsupport%2F+OR+site%3Acodex.wordpress.org+2.0.2&y=Search+the+Web&ei=UTF-8&fr=moz2&x=wrt
It appears to be doing the right thing, though.
Dangit, just hit the query limit for the day.
Holy crap, the limit’s like 5,000 per day per IP address. What are you doing?
Do you have another IP you could switch to?
This is the main search on wordpress.org, it gets a ton of traffic. I’m using a few other IPs now.
Oh, I figured you were doing this on a seperate development machine.
I should be! I’m going to feign ignorance and claim I’m “getting real.”
Why not post your ideal here so teams within Yahoo! or Google can understand what you would like to do but can’t? I had to read the comments to get a better idea what the post was really about, but maybe someone in Y! or G is listening and could help.
Sure,
My main earlier complaint turns out to be just a difference in how Yahoo and Google use their advanced operators. Google still handles HTML entities in titles better, but that’s been a problem at Yahoo for at least a year so I’m sure they know about it. I’m working around it by munging the results.
That SE you encourage others to use is no hoot either:
http://big.com/search.php?query=site%3Awordpress.org%2Fsupport%2F+2.0.2&x=0&y=0
Hmm, are you sure that Yahoo! is accidently failing with your title decorations, rather than intentionally translating? That’s not the “cute double-arrowhead pointing right” character, it’s the right quote character as used in some languages. Since I don’t speak one of those languages, and I’m querying in a language which doesn’t use that as a quote, I think it’s rather nice of them to translate it to something I do recognize as a quote.
Big.com is just a front-end, it’ll share the weaknesses of whoever it uses.
Phil, that’s a very astute observation. I think you may be right. I still think it’s a bad idea though.
Even the escape of Jeeves could not save Ask (Big harvest). Our Information Management professor has taken the toss out of them for many years. I guess I’m drifting off topic though…