Yahoo! Still in the race
Navigating from an announcement about Yahoo! (you know, that search engine/portal from the ’90s) reaching 20 billion indexed items (which is more than Google), I found out they had quite a few developper friendly features. Their Developer Network contains quite a few webservices to access Yahoo! content and tools. Google does have similar services, but they impose restrictions (they did last time I checked) on the amount of requests made daily. I don’t think Yahoo! has such restrictions, and they offer a lot more services, and they seem well documented.
Other than the simple web search, the term extraction service is very interesting. Given a content and a few keywords, in extracts related terms based on relations you can’t have unless you have a few million pages indexed locally. There are other services such as map (which is not as pretty as Google’s), various RSS feeds, multimedia search and even more. On of the best part is that the services use very simple XML formats and they are all described using XML Schemas.
Overall, the Yahoo! front page looks better than it used to, but there are still too many options for all those times I only want to search. If only they had a page with only a search bar… I really need to try it out on a regular basis to see how accurate the search results are. After all, they use PHP and I should support them.
Lessons learned
With the shuttle falling apart, the NASA had to come up with an alternative solution to the 2 decade old space vehicules. They decided to come back to an older design and specialize the tasks of the vehicules. Instead of trying to carry mens and meterials at once, they decided have a small rocket for mens and a large rocket for material. As always, the American “larger than before” rule applies.
I hope they actually plan on building smaller versions of the material rocket for all those cases they need to launch less than 100 tons of material, like food for the International Space Station crew or the staff that will live on the lunar station (that’s the Bush plan, right?).
No dates are set yet as no contracts to build the rockets have been signed so far, but since the shuttles retire in 5 years and Bush wants manned missions to Mars by 2025, it shouldn’t be too long before these giants fly.