Searching Yahoo’s Hack Day 2008

Yahoo hosted Hack Day this weekend, the Yahoo Yodel Anecdotal blog has four blog posts on the event:

• The hackers are back
• “6 PM Food, Beer & Games”
• Talkin’ about Girl Talk
• Highlights from Open Hack Day

The event looked incredibly fun! I just wanted to highlight the demo’s that took place that involved search. I might be missing some, so make sure to check out the complete list, if you don’t want to miss any.

#6, The Wobbly Wheel:

In the past 24 hours, we tried to change the classical view of shopping on the web. We implemented in page product comparison, and a universal shopping cart. We used the Yahoo Kelkoo shopping services, along with our own apis.

#7, Microformats and the future

Hack Does: Shows a glimps into the future where microformats are ubiquitous. APIs: Yahoo Boss Yahoo Tech: Yahoo Music Player Tech: PHP, Drupal, Mootools Needs: I have no special needs

#9, Skill Tag Hack

What it does: Improve internal communications. Pulls list of employees at each location, allows users to sort based on location or skills tags to get a better idea of who is in charge of what. APIs: Flickr, Maps, Patterns. Languages: PHP, HTML, CSS,

#16, Siffd

Searching Upcoming with YQL; working on sharing with e-mail and IM.

#19, Y!bqty

A showcase of integration between Yahoo APIs and Mozilla Ubiquity. Ubiquity plugins are written in pure Javascript and we made use of the FUEL library in FF3. APIs used in our Ubiquity commands: Yahoo Music, Yahoo Finance. We also played around with BOSS

#20, Search your own search results with BOSS

Search your own search results with BOSS

#22, OpenDNS Guide

Replaced Yahoo YDN with Yahoo BOSS to provide better search results and a better search experience to our end users. Converted internal APIs to JSON. Need to run demo on own computer due to VPN/internal resources.

#23, Find And Seek

This hack allows Yahoo! users to create and play Scavenger hunts based on Flickr images. The app itself is embedded in the Yahoo Application Platform so we make use of YML and the new Social API. Additionally, we obtain location information through Maps.

#26, SnackUpon

Get StumbleUpon-like behavior trained automatically from your own tags in delicious. Sources are BOSS news and web search, your Delicious network, recent Delicious posts, and your own recent posts.

#31, DarwinPorts RDFa

Mat Caughron with phenomenal advice from Paul Tarjan comments: SearchMonkey app: added microformats (RDFa) for port file web pages that are descriptions of open source software packages ported to MacOS. This makes the ports much more indexable by search engines.

More details can be found at http://developer.yahoo.net/hackday/2008/09/hack_day_demo_list.html.