Yahoo! used symfony to redevelop another project. This time symfony was used as part of the foundation for Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Answers is the largest collection of human knowledge on the Web with more than 135 million users and 515 million answers worldwide. Yahoo! Answers is the 2nd ranked education & reference site on the web and is available in 26 markets and 12 languages.

The post shares some of the thoughts behind the move including their philosophy, the design of the project and a link to a presentation given on the update.

Until now JSON output has been the only way to obtain all the data flowing through a Pipe. Starting today we've added a second way of getting all the data - serialized PHP Pipe output. [...] It's then up to you on how you want to display or use the Pipe data. The possibilities are endless.

If you haven't messed with Yahoo's Pipes system, you owe to it to yourself to at least go and play with it for a little bit.

Today's websites have a lot of content. [...] Needless to say, effectively searching all that data can be a real challenge, and chances are at the end of the day you'll still be stuck with a slow and ineffective search system. [...] Implementing effective search doesn't have to be hard. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to build a basic site-specific web search in just five lines of code, using the Yahoo! APIs.

He includes a (very) brief look at the search API Yahoo! offers followed by examples of queries and then on to the real deal, a search system that takes in a user query and asks the Yahoo! API for results matching it. The results are outputted below the box.

I recently came by this site WorldTimeEngine where users can search the local time of any place using the name, street address or just latitude and longitude. Since that time I was thinking how easily you can make your own. As long there are some good people over there (For Geocoding API) - its a not a big deal, you know?

His script pulls the location of the place (latitude/longitude) from the Yahoo! geocoding API and passes that back into the geonames web service to get the local time. The result is an array with the lat/long, address you submitted and the time output in a standard string.

This last installment of the series will be entirely focused on demonstrating how Inheritance can be used in a helpful way to build a set of child classes that will come in handy for consuming a specific Yahoo! Search Service.

They show how to use their current image search functionality and, with a few modifications, make a base class that can be used to support ech of the other search types (web, image, video) with common functionality and settings.

In simple terms, my plan will consist of creating some compact and modular PHP 5 classes, which will define a few basic methods for working with the different web services offered by Yahoo!.

They take the code they created from before (earlier parts of the series) and format it to fit into its own standalone class that can be included anywhere in an application. They create the class so it can search not only the normal results but it can also pull in the data from the video search Yahoo! offers as well.

Logically, these examples can be really useful for learning the basic concepts surrounding the use of these search services, but undoubtedly, it's necessary to modify and improve their source code to make it more compact and completely reusable.

They start the overhaul with the web search (complete with example results) then push on to the video and image searches and work them over the same way.

I woke up this morning to the news of a $44 billion buy-out offer from Microsoft for Yahoo!. This is being covered from all angles in various tech sites like Slashdot but I think the one angle I haven't seen yet is what does this mean for PHP?

He mentions the work that Microsoft and Zend have done to push PHP support on the OS (check out this email too) and he wonders what the final impact of it all could mean for the language - will things change drastically if Microsoft becomes a major player in the PHP world or would they stay behind the scenes and give the community the support it might need.

Maybe this short snippet helps someone out there when using YUI autocomplete feature together with the Zend Framework or any other Framework, that creates URLs like http://domain.tld/controller/action/param/value.

He modifies the Yahoo library to change a few of the defaults to make it more Zend Framework-friendly: changing the default query format and updating the "append parameters" concatenation to replace the ampersand with a slash.

In this third chapter of the series, I'm going to continue exploring in detail other helpful web services offered by Yahoo!, such as those focusing on searching images and videos. Also, I will demonstrate how they can be queried directly from a basic PHP 5 application and process the corresponding search results by utilizing the same group of array handling functions that you saw in the previous article of the series.

Just like in previous articles of the series, they make a simple class that connect to the Yahoo! web services and request search details back about their queries (like "Madonna").