After wrestling with Google’s search API, I found myself going back to the Yahoo Search API for many reasons.
1) Putting a Google Search on your website feels more like a hack than an elegant implementation…
2) Yahoo!’s search API allows you to do REST calls even on localhost as long as you have a valid Application ID, which you can easily acquire. (I’ll explain this in more detail below).
3) In terms of design, I have complete freedom with Yahoo!’s XML result set. With Google’s, you have to include the friggin’ CSS file, and apply some awkward h4cks to change the presentation.
The Google Search API will only allow you to access it based on the the API key and the URL which you registered. Thus, if you’re testing on localhost, it’ll reject your REST calls because your request isn’t coming from the URL you provided, but your IP of your connection. Oppositely, Yahoo! doesn’t care about the URL you’re accessing their APIs from. They only care about your application ID. Flexibility and convenience.
You can check out XWNED (http://xwned.com) now, it uses Yahoo! Web Search now instead of Google’s unflexible search API.
