Google has a new search product focused on source code. It peeks inside tarballs and other recognized formats, allowing you to search the index by regex, license, or language. It’s pretty easy to see how many projects are using a given library (such as feedparser or magpie) and keep inventing new ways to explore software. You can access the code search engine through a GData Atom feed for easy integration wherever you choose. I find Google Code Search is easier to use than Koders, and may come in handy when looking for different ways of approaching a particular programming…
Category Archives: Search
Google Gadgets on your webpage
Google “Universal” Gadgets are now available for blogs and pages around the web. A single Google gadget can now be deployed on Google Personalized Homepage, Google Desktop, Google Page Creator, or via a JavaScript embed on any editable webpage. You can add PacMan to your blog sidebar or display photos uploaded to Picassa on your MySpace page, or add a Google Reader viewer anywhere. Google’s support for webpage embeds brings the Google Reader story full circle. The team originally envisioned an RSS widget available on a blog sidebar and the project grew into much more. You can now access the…
Open Hack Day helps build YDN from the inside
Yahoo! hosted a public hack day last weekend, inviting 400 developers to learn more about the company, web development best practices, and how to use Yahoo! services in their own products and projects. The Yahoo! open hack day was the first big effort by a newly formed team seeking to gather support inside and outside Yahoo! as the programming world begins to embrace connected services in the data cloud. In this post I will provide some background on the team behind the event and present some of the direct and indirect benefits obtained within Yahoo! for their hard work. Background…
Yahoo Mail introduces web APIs
Yahoo Mail announced a SOAP and JSON-RPC API this morning at Yahoo! Hack Day. The new calls allow any developer to access a Yahoo! user’s existing mail preferences, messages, folders, and change data through create, delete or flag. Documentation of the pre-release API is currently only available through the Yahoo! Mail developer mailing list. You can do pretty much everything that’s possible with the new Yahoo! Mail beta, including searching mail messages (including attachments), fetching mail from external POP accounts, scrubbed HTML message bodies, and MIME decodings. I’m pretty impressed with the amount of effort spent on these APIs and…
Matt McAlister moves to YDN
Matt McAlister has changed jobs within Yahoo!, moving away from the RSS group and into the Yahoo Developer Network. He follows former RSS PM Scott Gatz into the advanced products and media side of the business under Bradley Horowitz. Matt’s move is interesting timing given the recent addition of a Yahoo! Mail full beta and all the users that come with it to the backend RSS platform. The Product Strategy group at Yahoo! continues to attract company talent into a side of the business I call “Jerry’s slush fund.” Employees are given more opportunity to think big and take risks…
Yahoo Hack Day, a career fair for an era of participation
Yahoo! is hosting an open hack day at their Sunnyvale headquarters next Friday and Saturday, introducing developers to well-known Yahoo! employees and development tools. I view the whole thing as a new take on the career fairs of the past, where introductions happen over clever code instead of a carefully crafted resume attempting to make its way through the various cogs on its way to a decision maker. You can try navigating the Yahoo! careers site to figure out which of the 115 open PHP positions are right for you. There are few details available about the event but that…
Yahoo! bundled with Acer computers
Yahoo! and Acer announced a multi-year agreement to bundle Yahoo! Search, Toolbar, and start page with all Acer computers sold around the world. Acer is the top notebook vendor in Europe, Middle East, and Africa and third largest in Asia Pacific according to Gartner. The new deal should give Yahoo!’s international market share a nice boost. The press release mentions a cobranded homepage in the style of Yahoo!’s recent redesign. Acer will set Yahoo! as the default search in Internet Explorer 7 and Yahoo! Toolbar will come pre-installed. Yahoo! services will be present on all Acer computers shipping after October…
Yahoo! Mail enters public beta
The new Yahoo! Mail has entered public beta, incorporating many features from Oddpost into a new PHP front-end. The new Yahoo! Mail features a two-pane interface for reading feeds in one scrollable page. Yahoo! Mail product manager Ethan Diamond told Richard MacManus “the [feed reading] feature is kinda in stealth mode; we are not drawing much attention to it.” Yahoo! Mail will auto-subscribe users to “the most popular feeds across the Yahoo! network”, adding a few feeds to Yahoo! Mail’s user base of over 250 million users. The Yahoo! Mail feed view is built on-top of the My Yahoo! feed…
Google personalized recommendations widget
iGoogle users can now add a Google Gadget to their homepage showing recommended searches, pages, and gadgets based on behavior across Google search properties. The new service builds on top of Google’s search history trends data by adding recommended destination pages and new homepage gadgets. The widget was written by “Beverly Y.” in Google’s New York office. I found the recommendations useful with some expected content and a few surprises thrown in as well. “Burning Man” might be geo-targetted since I live in San Francisco, but three RSS recommendations in the top 5 is right on. I was researching…
Microsoft AdCenter classifies web users into 18 categories
Microsoft’s adCenter online advertising product includes behavioral targeting, a way to predict a customer’s age, gender, and other demographic information based on search queries and web browsing behavior. Yesterday Microsoft began incorporating behavioral targeting into adCenter, classifying users into 18 “audience segments.” Web users tracked by Microsoft are currently identified in one or more categories including mobile users, Internet power users, gamers, movie watchers, new/expecting moms, parents, and several categories encompassing travel searchers, and auto buyers and researchers. Once a user is classified, a site such as Live.com can suggest the best homepage gadgets for an expectant mother, gamer, or…