Yahoo lets you roll your own search engine

Wired reports that Yahoo has done one better on Google's Custom Search by giving developers access to Yahoo's own index:

To start your own search engine using Yahoo data, sign up for an API key at Yahoo’s developer network.
The API works much like any web framework. Query the API, and you will
get an XML file of search results that match your query. Yahoo will
also provide a mash-up library in the Python programming language.

This could be a boon to archivists and anyone else who wants to write their own harvester using data scattered over a distributed network.

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