Yahoo Hack

Hacks 22: Introduction Many of us use search engines in the same way we we use street signs. We use them to navigate, to get our bearings, and to pinpoint our destination. We rarely stop to consider the signs themselves or look for more information ...

Using Yahoo! Web Search (http://search.yahoo.com) is deceptively simple. You can type in any word or phrase and find matches in documents across the Web. The trade-off for this simplicity is having to look through hundreds, thousands, or millions of ...

At its most basic, Yahoo! Search allows you to type in search terms, click the Search button, and receive documents that include that word or phrase from across the Web. This makes Yahoo! a keyword search engine, and knowing this can help you put tog...

A Yahoo! ID is what distinguishes you from the crowd and what lets Yahoo! remember you across browsing sessions and across computers. If you've been using the Web for any amount of time, chances are good that you already have a Yahoo! ID. In November...

If you already have a Yahoo! ID, you can set some preferences that will affect the appearance and content of your Yahoo! searches. To set your preferences, first make sure you're logged in to Yahoo! by visiting http://login.yahoo.com and entering you...

In addition to the simple search form you'll find at http://search.yahoo.com, Yahoo! offers an Advanced Web Search form at http://search.yahoo.com/web/advanced. This form lets you refine your search in a number of ways, so you can narrow the results ...

Because the Web is a global space, we've all come across pages in different languages, especially among search results. If you're searching for information about a phrase like hamburger recipe, it's strange to come across a page about it in German. I...

The Yahoo! My Web beta gives you a powerful set of tools to collect web pages, annotate them, and share them with others. In My Web, you can save links to your favorite web sites (much like bookmarks) and organize them in custom folders. But there ar...

If you know how to use them properly, search engines are pretty darn good at finding exactly the page you're looking for. Google is so confident in its algorithm that it includes a hidden attribute in the search results page that tells Firefox to pre...

If you've ever searched for the same phrase at both Yahoo! and Google, you've probably noticed that the results can be surprisingly different. That's because Yahoo! and Google have different ways of determining which sites are relevant for a particul...

Most of the text, images, and audio you find through a Yahoo! Search are copyrighted materials. In fact, even if the author of a page or image doesn't specify that her work is copyrighted, a copyright still exists; by default, all works are copyright...

As Yahoo! Search scours the Web, it indexes not only the documents, text, and images it finds, but also video clips. Video files don't show up in a standard Yahoo! Web Search, but you can visit the Yahoo! Video Search to find clips from every corner ...

The Yahoo! Toolbar is a browser extension offered by Yahoo! that integrates many of Yahoo!'s features with your web browser. After installing the toolbar, you'll find an extra row of buttons in your browser, as shown in Figure 1-32. Figure 1-32. T...

If you use the Firefox web browser (available at http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox), you're probably already aware of the useful search box in the upper-right corner. From any page, at any time, you can simply type a query into the box and pres...

Everywhere we look in the media, there are lists of bestsellers that can tell us what's hot at the moment. People watch the top-grossing movies like they'd watch the stock market, and best-selling books are always a topic of conversation. Yahoo! has ...

If you follow technology trends like some people follow the stock market, you can put your knowledge to work by placing your bets on where technology is headed at the Yahoo! Buzz Game (http://buzz.research.yahoo.com). But even if you can't tell an iP...

Most of the time, we're all surfing the Web in virtual isolation. It's just you and the computer, and the last thing on your mind is the length of a URL at a page you're visiting. But as soon as you want to share the piece of the Web you're viewing w...

Browser cookies are an important piece of web technology that sites like Yahoo! rely on to give you a personalized experience at their site. Without cookies, Yahoo! wouldn't be able to let you choose your own news sources at My Yahoo!, watch your fav...

Whether you're a potential employee, investor, competitor, or just a fan of the site, you'll want to keep tabs on what Yahoo! is doing and where it may be headed. The news sources in this hack should give you a starting point for watching the company...

This hack walks through creating a framework for full-site spidering, including additional filters to lessen your load. In this hack, you'll learn how to write a spider that crawls the Yahoo! group of portals. The choice of Yahoo! was obvious; becau...

Yahoo! started in 1994 as Jerry Yang and David Filo's organized list of favorite sites they'd found on the Web. Yahoo! has grown into much, much more, and many people think of Yahoo! as strictly a search company. Searching is great when you have a fa...

Every day, a squad of surfers at Yahoo! adds new sites to the Yahoo! index. These changes are reflected in the Yahoo! What's New page (http://dir.yahoo.com/new), along with the Picks of the Day. If you're a casual surfer, you might not care about th...

Yahoo! indexes only a site's main URL, title, and description, while Google builds full-text indexes of entire sites. Surely there's some interesting cross-pollination when you combine results from the two. This hack scrapes all the URLs in a specif...