Yahoo Search Broken (again?)

[inurl:yahoo.com search], no results found. This search worked fine days ago. Contrast. This is why WordPress.org search is broken. Any suggestions for better web search API providers? I loooove the way Yahoo provides results as serialized PHP in addition to XML (every API provider should do that!) but the underlying search product seems to be built on a shaky foundation.

31 thoughts on “Yahoo Search Broken (again?)

  1. The problem must be widespread, because I’ve tried proxying the requests through 7 machines in various datacenters.

  2. Wait, so when you guys click the first link in the post, you see results? It doesn’t give you this?

    We did not find results for “inurl:yahoo.com search”.

  3. Matt, I can confirm that yahoo is returning “We did not find any results” on my computer.

    This is from here in Australia, as well as proxied through a few datacentres in the US. Same result each time, regardless of the location.

  4. I get results for the first search link on yahoo: “1 – 10 of about 130,000,000 for inurl:yahoo.com search – 0.03 sec. “, with yahoo.com coming up as the first result.

  5. I don’t think they did, because it most certainly isn’t working here.
    I’m not a Yahooligan, but if you’re sure of the Syntax in that link then something is definitely up.

    There *are* many other search providers, some of them that even match Google’s black-box rack-mount servers that you can buy for an organization and some of these are open source, in keeping with the WordPress Spirit 🙂

    If you’re interested in switching or whatnot, drop me an email, and we’ll see what we can find.

    What sucks is you’re going to have to redo the entire WordPress.org site to match the new API for whatever product you choose, but I’m sure the brains at WordPress can figure out how to do it in as little time/effort/cost as possible.

  6. I think I’ve said it before, but I’ll reiterate: Since Yahoo Search was implemented, with the combined results of both the codex, forums, blog and what not, I haven’t been able to find anything… If you keep with Yahoo, or a similar solution, I’d love to see an easy way of searching only a particular section of the WordPress network.

    PS: Yes, I know you can do searches for a particular URL, but that’s a hack at best, and something 99% of the users looking for help won’t know how to do, or like me, is too lazy to figure out the syntax for.

  7. Doesn’t work for me, I get “We did not find results for “inurl:yahoo.com search”.”

    Nothing for “inurl:yahoo.com news” either. Looks more like an intentional block from their side, rather than a bug

  8. As I recall it, I’d always get “We couldn’t find anything! Please try a different search.” while using wordpress.org search. In fact I cannot remember a single time it has returned any results. These days I’m manually typing “site:wordpress.org” into Google. Works every time.

  9. Michael, you may not have checked out the search lately, but it gives you options about which section to search. It default to just the Codex, but allows support forums, trac, etc.

  10. aah, I was wondering what the heck was wrong when I spent hours trying to search my way through the wordpress codex. I hope it gets better soon though. Doesn’t work down here either. Also, before this, everytime I tried to search from the search page, it used to break.

  11. Your example is broken, (domain in inurl:) but this works fine for me:

    site:wordpress.org inurl:support RSS

    Why not just use the site: operator to designate the domain, and then use inurl: to designate a subdirectory?

  12. Mark, I’ll try that to bring the search back online quickly, thanks for the suggestion. What’s weird is that it just stopped working overnight.

  13. Actually the inurl: operator is not designed for that purpose, it is suppose to do a search in all the sites that contains the word that follows the : within the url.

    If what you want to do, is a search that is restricted to an specific domain you have to use the site: operator instead. Then you can combine it with inurl: to force the search to be a little more specific, so you have.

    site:matt.wordpress.com * for a search that is only restricted to the (sub)domain.

    site:matt.wordpress.com inurl:2006 * for a search that is also restricted to the (sub)domain but requires the word/number 2006 to be within the url.

  14. We were using inurl: because Yahoo doesn’t allow you to put a full path in site: like Google does.

    Using site + inurl I’ve got the search working now again, hopefully for good. It’s bizarre that the linked search works for some folks but not for others.

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