I am using Yahoo’s news search service in my website to grab recent news. Unfortunately I cannot figure out what special terms are allowed in the query. The documentation is located here:
http://developer.yahoo.com/search/web/V1/webSearch.html
All that document says about the query is:
The query to search for (UTF-8 encoded). This query supports the full search language of Yahoo! Search, including meta keywords. Total size of he query must be less than 1KB. For details on constructing queries, see Search Tips.
I can’t seem to find a definitive list of the “full search language of Yahoo!”, and their Search Tips link is broken.
I would like to use some boolean logic and word groupings in my query, but I don’t know what is understood by Yahoo! and what is not. For example, can I group words at all? and if I can do they grouped with or () ?
Further I seem to be getting some strange results with my guess work - using OR’s in my query I am able to add certain things that take my search results down to ZERO. But why would that make sense? Why would “search term 1” ever return more results than “search term 1 OR search term 2”?
Anyway, if anyone has experience with the Yahoo! News search service and could shed some light on this, I would appreciate it.
