Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
ways to narrow your results, such as searching for results only in Creative
Commons (a “some rights reserved” alternative to full copyright, “all rights
reserved” protection) content. here's another option for searching Yahoo's
subscription-based content. You can get to Yahoo's Advanced Web Search
page directly at
http://search.yahoo.com/search/options.
hints
n
Use quotes for phrases.
n
exclude words from your search results when appropriate.
n
Use the special content searches with more general queries to
narrow your results.
n
note that Yahoo's results show when a site has an rss feed.
This could be a useful rss feed discovery tool for you.
Trapping
Yahoo does not ofer alerts for page search results, so set Yahoo's prefer-
ences to show 100 results per page. hen run your search, and aterward
monitor that page of results. hat monitored page will look for changes in
only the top 100 results, which is another reason why you need to make sure
your query is narrow enough.
Yahoo also ofers RSS feeds for search results, though you have to jump
through a couple of hoops to create them—namely, you need to edit a URL.
Here's how:
he base URL for getting an RSS feed of Yahoo's search results looks like this:
http://api.search.yahoo.com/WebSearchService/rss/webSearch.
xml?appid=yahoosearchwebrss&query=keyword
You need to change
keyword
to the appropriate query word. If you want to
use quotes or several words, you need to make sure they're encoded prop-
erly (encoded just means writing characters in a certain way so that the
browser can read them in the URL).
For instance, you want to combine words using the plus sign (+). To search
for “three blind mice,” use
three+blind+mice
. To remove words, use the
minus sign (-). To remove “mice” from the equation, for example, use
three+blind-mice
. To establish phrases, use %22 at the beginning and at the
end of your query. For example, to ind the phrase “three blind mice,” use
%22three+blind+mice%22
.
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