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

Compare the Popularity of Related Search Terms

By gluing together two different kinds of Yahoo! Web Services requests, you can find the most widely used alternate search requests for any given topic.

Though the Yahoo! Search engine is something each of us use in isolation, from Yahoo!’s perspective searching is a group activity. They have the ability to analyze each individual query and group it together with other, similar queries. When you do a web search on Yahoo!, you can get a glimpse of these similar phrases. Figure 5-33 highlights the list of “Also try:” phrases for a search on the term robot.

Yahoo! has also exposed some of this group data in the Related Suggestions feature of Yahoo! Search Web Services.

Yahoo! related terms for “activeX”

Figure 5-32. Yahoo! related terms for “activeX”

“Also try:” related suggestion on Yahoo! Search results

Figure 5-33. “Also try:” related suggestion on Yahoo! Search results

Related Suggestions returns a list of alternate phrases for any given search term or phrase. For example, if I ask Yahoo! for related suggestions for the term robot, Yahoo! will return a long list of alternates, including industrial robots, toy robots, humanoid robots, building robots, and so on. This not only gives you a window to what other robot-minded Yahoo! users are searching for, but it can also help you refine your own query to find just the information ...

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.
Start your free trial

You might also like

What Employees Want Most in Uncertain Times

What Employees Want Most in Uncertain Times

Kristine W. Powers, Jessica B.B. Diaz
How to Become a Game-Changing Leader

How to Become a Game-Changing Leader

Douglas A. Ready, Alan Mulally

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596009453Supplemental ContentErrata Page