Hugo’s blog

Having recently played with Yahoo! Search, I realized that one thing was missing for me to use it daily: Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky function.

I don’t type URLs; I use Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky function for that. I don’t need to remember whether I need to type http://www.whitehouse.org/ or http://www.whitehouse.com/ or http://www.whitehouse.gov/, I just type white house and trust a search engine to know the answer better than I do and to take me there.

Yahoo! has Instant Search which is similar; it’s cool technically, but it doesn’t do it for me as it’s harder to integrate into my start page compared to just adding another submit button.

However, I did see some advantages to using Yahoo! Search. Yahoo! has a large number of services (TV schedule, movie reviews, weather service, etc.), and their search engine gives you access to those services in a well integrated way.

This prompted me to look into implementing this functionality myself, which was very easy thanks to the Yahoo! Web Search API JSON’s output. The only problem is that I can’t use the back button when I use it, and I am not sure it’s possible to get this functionality as JavaScript redirection seems to overwrite the current history entry, and editing the browser history doesn’t seem possible.

Something interesting that I discovered while doing Take Me There and working on a SOAP & Ajax validation tool for the W3C validators is that, using XMLHttpRequest() to do an HTTP GET, you face cross-domain security description and can’t do the request outside of the domain where the JavaScript lives, while using the JSON callback output of the Yahoo! API to basically do something identical, you don’t have this problems. I need to think more about those security aspects of JavaScript.

Anyway, it’s there for people to play with: Take Me There!