Naver: Looking beyond Google/Yahoo/Bing
Posted on | August 26, 2009 | No Comments
When it comes to search engine APIs, there are increasingly slim pickings from the big three: Google dropped the SOAP API for the AJAX API; Live/Bing dropped their link commands; whilst no one seems to know what will happen with Yahoo’s API in the future. With search engines potentially offering extremely valuable information it is worth looking further afield.
I’ve just finished writing a program using the Naver API for some colleagues in South Korea:
Whilst it was not an easy task to get an Naver API-key (in the end someone else got it on my behalf), and some of the words were stored as images (i.e., not much use to Google Translate), once the API-key was acquired Naver APIs were very easy to use. Naver has a host of indexes including blogs, images, videos, and academic documents. Unfortunately Naver doesn’t have any link operators, and the index contains less English language pages than would be found in the indexes of the American search engines.
Nonetheless Naver does serve as a reminder that there are possibilities away from Google, Bing, and Yahoo. We just need to start looking at them; even if that does require the help of Google Translate.
Comments
Leave a Reply