Skip to Content
Yahoo! Hacks
book

Yahoo! Hacks

by Paul Bausch
October 2005
Intermediate to advanced
489 pages
12h 2m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Yahoo! Hacks

Yahoo! Directory Mindshare in Google

How does link popularity compare in Yahoo!’s searchable subject index versus Google’s full-text index? Find out by calculating mindshare!

Yahoo! and Google are two very different animals. 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 specified subcategory of the Yahoo! directory. It then takes each URL and gets its link count from Google. Each link count provides a nice snapshot of how a particular Yahoo! category and its listed sites stack up on the popularity scale.

Tip

What’s a link count? It’s simply the total number of pages in Google’s index that link to a specific URL.

There are a couple of ways you can use your knowledge of a subcategory’s link count. If you find a subcategory whose URLs have only a few links each in Google, you may have found a subcategory that isn’t getting a lot of attention from Yahoo!’s editors. Consider going elsewhere for your research. If you’re a webmaster and you’re considering paying to have Yahoo! add you to its directory, run this hack on the category in which you want to be listed. Are most of the links really popular? If they are, are you sure your site will stand out and get clicks? Maybe you should choose a different category.

We got this idea from a similar experiment done by Jon Udell (http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

What Successful Project Managers Do

What Successful Project Managers Do

W. Scott Cameron, Jeffrey S. Russell, Edward J. Hoffman, Alexander Laufer
How to Overcome a Power Deficit

How to Overcome a Power Deficit

Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596009453Errata Page