Quite some time back I wrote about Google Search Hacks that you could use to check the health of your blog. I promised at the time to look at Yahoo hacks but never got around to it. Well, lets put that straight now shall we? Here’s a short list of some of the more fun things you can do with Yahoo Search…
1. Use the Real Interface
Just so that we’re all on the same page, search.yahoo.com is the url you need.
2. Find ALL Your Links
Finding links to your blogs is easy enough in part. Google will show you some of them, but only to specific pages, and technorati will also show you some of them, though they’ll arguably be a little fresher than Google. What you can do with Yahoo though is better, much better:
Enter the linkdomain command in the search box like this: linkdomain:mydomainsanswww.com. You can see how it works in the image below:
3. Yahoo Blog Search
You can do a Yahoo blog search by hacking at Yahoo News. Try the Search box below:
If you want to put that code on your own site, just paste the code below onto a blank html page or put it on a post.
4. Search Creative Commons
This made a big splash when they first announced it, but i’ll bet it’s news to some of you reading this right? You can search for only material licensed under creative commons, which means that if you’re looking for content to mix into topic then you can do so without fear copyright violation.
You have to go to the advanced search page and tick the appropriate box. Easy eh?
Tip: The advanced search page is only one click away, and can REALLY help you search better.
5. Get Search Results as RSS
Unlike Google, Yahoo make it possible for you to subscribe to regular search results. There is no button on the page, but if your browser does not pick up the RSS via auto discovery, you can check the souce for a url like this: http://api.search.yahoo.com/ WebSearchService/rss/webSearch.xml?appid= yahoosearchwebrss&query=performancing&adult_ok=1 (note i put a couple of spaces in there so the line would break).
Anyone Else?
I’ll be the first to admit that my search skills aren’t what they once were, so I’d love to see any other hacks you can come up with specifically for Yahoo search!
powered by performancing firefox
7 thoughts on “5 Yahoo Search Hacks”
MSN is fast in picking up new sites and MSN has different ranking arithmetics so a fresh site comes up very quick (my experience). Google follows after a while if the site is still offering fresh content – the so called sandbox period. Yahoo is the slowest in ranking updates with fresh sites but once you have a high ranking you normally keep it – even if the page disappears 🙂
The motto is ‘be patient’ …
Interesting, I just started playing around with this and I was amazed that out of Yahoo, Google and MSN, MSN gave by far the better settings and results.
What with this and my playing with IE7, I hate to admit it, my experience with MS is moving in a positive direction…hangs head.
BlackVV check the other search engines too. SEs have different frequencies in picking up content and also in updating their backlink indexes.
This is pretty interesting stuff, I do note that there was only one link found to my blog though… 🙁 Which is disappointing…
Markus, Yahoo only include a small selection of blogs in their “complimentary” news results, which is where the blog results box is querying.
dkessaris, great point on -site it can make a big difference to some searches for sure.
To find the backlinks to my sites I usually use the linkdomain command a bit differently
here is how
That way the links from the domain I am looking, back to the same domain are excluded
I also use Yahoo’s siteexplorer
Other operators that I use to check a keyword’s competition are
inurl:keyword
intitle:keyword (they work with google as well)
Especially that my blog is not found with the blog search 🙂 It seems as if the blog search doesn’t search for foreign pages? (It is also not possible to change the TLD to .de and a hl=de also doesn’t help to find German pages).
But it is always worth to check out all the local service versions by changing the top level domain (TLD). I.e. search.yahoo.de redirects to the nice German Yahoo search form http://de.search.yahoo.com/ (and per default only looks for German content).
It is also a nice side-kick to add a Yahoo alert button to your page which will alarm readers if a new article was published. I prefer FeedBurner but many people might feel more ‘home’ with a Yahoo button (http://beta.alerts.yahoo.com/blogs_publish.php).
Comments are closed.