Why Google sucks and Yahoo! rocks
Despite being a champion of open source, Google have discontinued their SOAP search API. This sucks because those who previously wanted to get information from Google’s SERPs programmatically (ie to check up on their website’s ranking for certain keywords, etc) without resorting to screen scraping, now have to do just that - which is incidentally against their t&cs.
Admittedly the Google API was at best patchy, but it was a step in the right direction. Anyway, Yahoo! rocks because I’ve discovered their search API is tons better - solid, reliable, and it allows 5x more queries per day than the Google one did.
So as a celebration of this discovery, I wrote a nice little Yahoo backlink checker - especially useful for checking out deleted domains before buying them. Simply download the two files below, change the file extension to .php and upload them onto your server (note: you’ll need to replace the API key in the request URL in yahoo2.txt with your own key):
Enjoy!
