Compare the Popularity of Related Search Terms
By gluing together two different kinds of Yahoo! Web Services requests, you can find the most widely used alternate search requests for any given topic.
Though the Yahoo! Search engine is something each of us use in isolation, from Yahoo!’s perspective searching is a group activity. They have the ability to analyze each individual query and group it together with other, similar queries. When you do a web search on Yahoo!, you can get a glimpse of these similar phrases. Figure 5-33 highlights the list of “Also try:” phrases for a search on the term robot.
Yahoo! has also exposed some of this group data in the Related Suggestions feature of Yahoo! Search Web Services.
Figure 5-32. Yahoo! related terms for “activeX”
Figure 5-33. “Also try:” related suggestion on Yahoo! Search results
Related Suggestions returns a list of alternate phrases for any given search term or phrase. For example, if I ask Yahoo! for related suggestions for the term robot, Yahoo! will return a long list of alternates, including industrial robots, toy robots, humanoid robots, building robots, and so on. This not only gives you a window to what other robot-minded Yahoo! users are searching for, but it can also help you refine your own query to find just the information ...
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